The Voucher Fallacy: Thomas Paine, Democratic Schooling, and Educational Inequality 1 1 1 Stillwaggon, J. ; Callagy, C. ; Brescia, K. 1 Iona College, United States Email: jstillwaggon@iona.edu; ccallagy@iona.edu; kchappelle@iona.edu Abstract Despite its limited treatment in his own work, Thomas Paine’s authority on democratic education has been widely invoked by parties interested in privatizing public schooling in America’s poor, inner-city districts through educational voucher programs. Claiming Paine as the founder of their ideas, scholarly and popular authors have cited Paine’s brief proposal for funding rural schools in Rights of Man (1791). We argue that Paine’s plan for offering vouchers to the rural poor of 18th century England bears no clear relation or support to current voucher proposals: Paine’s plan does not replace an existing public system with vouchers, but uses government’s negative capacity to limit excesses in the social sphere (1776). This negative argument is only achieved against a backdrop of more complex questions about schooling as one element of democratic society. As Paine’s proposal and contemporary voucher proposals both respond to the failure of existing schools to serve all students, we consider Paine’s influence on American public schooling, distinguishing between the distributional ideal of a publicly funded education and the formative educational ideal of an education for the public, expressed in the American judicial doctrine that separate is inherently unequal. From McClintock’s (2004) concept of formative justice, aligned with Weithman’s (2010) understanding of motivational adequacy, we argue that Paine employs schooling as one site where a universal right might contribute to a broader confluence of formative influences. In line with a number of otherwise divided thinkers on social justice and education (CFE v. NYS: 2006, Anyon: 1997, Ravitch: 1983) Paine does not see education as a means toward equalizing economic conditions, but as one of many elements of a democratic culture in which equality serves as a regulative ideal. Keywords: Thomas Paine; school vouchers; educational inequality; democratic education A nation under a well regulated government should permit none to remain uninstructed. It is monarchial and aristocratical governments, only, that require ignorance for their support. Suppose then four hundred thousand children to be in this condition, which is a greater number than ought to be supposed. After the provisions already made, the method will be: To allow for each of those children ten shillings a year for the expense of schooling, for six years each, which will give them six months schooling each year, and half a crown a year for paper and spelling books. Public schools do not answer the general purpose of the poor. They are chiefly in corporation-towns, from which the country towns and villages are excluded; or, if admitted, the distance occasions a great loss of time. Education, to be useful to the poor, should be on the spot; and the best method, I believe, to accomplish this, is to enable the parents to pay the expense themselves. (Paine, 1791, V.5) Thomas Paine’s authority in democratic theory typically extends to debates regarding the integrity of individual conscience as the basis of democratic participation, or the necessity of limiting government in the name of personal freedom. One area of debate in which Paine’s name has recently been widely invoked, despite its limited treatment in 1 his own work, is that of equitable opportunities in publicly-funded schools. Parties interested in privatizing public schooling in America’s poor, inner-city districts through school vouchers have claimed Paine as the founder of their ideas, citing the brief proposal above. Tying a contemporary policy proposal to an authorial intent of one of America’s founding fathers is a common rhetorical move in contemporary American politics, and in this case creates the appearance of a positive relationship between democratic ideals and market forces in public education. But those who found contemporary voucher plans in Paine’s thought ignore significant themes in Paine’s politics that would nullify their claims in light of the regulative role that Paine sets for government in relation to social and economic inequalities. Their work begs for critical analysis, as it fails its own standard of anchoring public policy in original intent. The present paper might seem to be an exercise of swinging at shadows, given the dearth of refereed scholarly sources addressing the supposed connection between Paine’s voucher proposal for rural English communities and contemporary voucher proposals for existing districts in the United States. But addressing a widely-held belief propagated largely through unregulated channels of contemporary popular media holds a peculiarly Painean value. Positively, it allows for public engagement in an area of politics where a democratic thinker’s words have been uncritically invoked. Negatively, the lack of scholarly attention to Paine’s influence on school vouchers has not delegitimized false claims, but instead has allowed their flourishing under the guise of limiting government authority. Contemporary Uses of Paine’s Voucher Proposal Citing Paine’s support of vouchers has become a popular rhetorical device among voucher proponents who take the authorial intent of America’s founding fathers to serve as a sufficient guide for contemporary policy. Those who use Paine’s name employ a strategy of making school privatization appear both conservative in its association with national origins and revolutionary in its undermining of public schools. Bringing these conflicted images together, voucher advocates suggest that vouchers can be both a radical departure from tradition and perfectly in line with original American ideals. While many sources simply include Paine’s name as an early voucher proponent, others fictionalize Paine’s proposal to fit the political aims of contemporary voucher plans. Here, we highlight some of the more egregious misuses of Paine’s words. Selectively referencing Paine’s voucher proposal and combining it with selections from Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, Coulson (n.d.) argues that “The excerpts listed above all argue that schools need not be run by the government, and several argue that they should not be. In truth, Paine’s proposal diverges from Smith’s and Milton’s work insofar as it says nothing about whether schools ought to be run by the government. Paine’s contribution to the intellectual history of public schooling is his call for government responsibility in ensuring that inequalities in education are adequately addressed by the state. Coulson broadcasts his own caricatured understanding of politics by equating public education with the “totalitarian approach to education” undertaken by the ancient Spartans. Paine’s proposal, by contrast, only critiques public schools insofar as they “are chiefly in corporation-towns, from which the country towns and villages are excluded.” In other words, there are not enough schools to go around. Browne et al (n.d.) claim that “*Paine+ theorized that educational choice would promote competition and lead to the success and vitality of the best schools.” Like Coulson’s, the work of Browne et al has no basis in any of Paine’s writings, but merely projects an anachronistic misunderstanding based on current arguments for school vouchers. These authors in turn cite Bierlein (1993, p.93): [Smith] believed that anyone paid from the public purse, including teachers, lacked motivation for performance possessed by those in the private realm. Therefore, some means to introduce competition into the system was essential. Paine took this idea one step further by proposing that England provide each pupil with an education allowance good for 6 years at any school of choice. His theory was that educational choice would promote competition and lead to the success and profitability of the best schools. Bierlien comes closer to describing Paine’s proposal, but loads it with motivations that, once again, cannot be found anywhere in Paine’s work. Bierlien in turn cites Kirkpatrick (1990), whose work is unabashedly one-sided, as is evident from his book’s title, and adds neither intelligent argument nor factual clarity to the record. Again, Paine’s proposal says nothing about competition, success, or the vitality of schools, but as these suit the ideological commitments of current voucher movements, the authors fictionalize Paine’s account to fit their own beliefs. 2 Perhaps the most egregious mishandling of Paine’s voucher proposal comes from Cookson (2004): The American revolutionary Thomas Paine advocated a voucher system because he felt that compulsory education violated individual conscience. He was following the perspective of John Stuart Mill, who believed that state-sponsored education was a contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another. Cookson’s claims falsify Paine’s ideas in two ways: first, Paine’s proposal is entirely economic, and says nothing at all about conscience. Second, Paine’s proposal was written about fifteen years before Mill’s birth, and Paine died when Mill was three years old, making any influence from the latter to the former quite difficult. A single scholarly article by West (1967) recognizes no connection between Paine’s proposal and Friedman’s but for the most general idea of paying public funds to private schools. Some authors have found connections between Friedman’s proposal and the G.I. Bill (Lowe, 1995) while still others have suggested that current voucher plans closely resemble Southern states’ use of vouchers for the purpose of continued segregation. Recognizing the flawed manner in which Paine’s ideas have been applied to educational policy, we turn to interpreting his political philosophy in order to establish a stronger basis for future applications. Paine on Society, Government, and Education While Paine (1794) makes his views on some aspects of education manifestly clear - critiquing religious instruction for its cultivation of anti-scientific thinking in the young – his support for universal, public education emerges through a number of unconnected but nonetheless coherent statements, including his proposal for educational vouchers discussed above, his claim of education as a human right (1793), and his critique of monarchy as devoid of intellectual authority (1776). As Paine’s view of education is directly tied to social and political concerns, any reading of Paine’s voucher plan must begin by considering schools’ place in the social order. In Common Sense (1776), Paine argues two points that serve as basic conditions for any democratic form of schooling. The first of these is the founding of governmental legitimacy on the basis of knowledge. Paine’s argument against monarchy as a legitimate form of government takes as its most fundamental assumption that the authority to govern must be founded in the knowledge of those who lead. A royal ruler, Paine argues, fails to meet this most basic requirement insofar as the monarchical crown is passed from one bearer to another by virtue of familial inheritance rather than by knowledge of how to lead. As the founding of political legitimacy in knowledge and understanding sets clear requirements for leadership, it also establishes a foundation for democratic political participation and defines an essential element of democratic life, namely the exchange of ideas and the priority of education as both the means of preparing rulers and the mechanism by which those better prepared to lead might be distinguished. Modern democracy – at least in Paine’s view – is rule by those who know how. Based on this definition, taken up in one way or another by a wide variety of democratic thinkers, modern democracy and universal education have become inseparable concepts, tied together by the ideal of all human beings participating in a shared, perfectible nature. Yet if knowledge serves as the legitimate foundation for political power, and education the mechanism by which knowledge empowers a people to lead, Paine’s political philosophy draws an important distinction between education as a social function that allows human knowledge to be reproduced and developed from one generation to the next and the government’s role in public schooling. According to Paine, social forces emerge organically from various ways of living together that humans have developed over thousands of years. In contrast, government forces are designed and imposed upon social groups for the explicit purpose of limiting the overreaching effects of human desire that accrue within the social order, producing inequalities that subvert the stability of social life. Government regulation presents human actors with a “necessary evil” in Paine’s words insofar as it limits some individuals’ pursuit of goods they would otherwise choose in the absence of constraints; government is nonetheless a “necessary evil” because without it, according to Paine, unchecked social difference would grow to inhuman proportions, undermining the complex unity that makes society possible. 3 While most voucher proponents mistakenly associate Paine’s description of government as a “necessary evil” with a simple advocacy of small government, or a skepticism regarding all government, Paine does not call for small government at all. Against the misattributed Thoreauian quotation “That government is best which governs least,” Paine calls for a government that exists contingently in relation to the social inequalities that it serves to limit. The greater and more numerous the inequalities that persist in society, the greater the need for government intervention. While this relative formulation of government does entail the paradoxical perspective that government governs best when it makes itself obsolete, it bears no resemblance to the political doctrine espoused by contemporary voucher proponents of small government by means of privatization. Reframing education in light of Paine’s distinction, we can easily recognize knowledge as a currency of social life which becomes inevitably inequitably distributed through education based on relative economic advantages multiplied over generations. Aside from the limited experiments in democratic education undertaken since Paine’s time, the entire history of formal education has served the preservation of privilege among a small, elite class. Privileged classes’ investment in their children’s education results in a greater accumulation of power and wealth in the hands of the few. What begins as a socially sanctioned good for particular individuals becomes an evil for society, insofar as it produces power differentials too great to address by civil means. If, according to Paine’s distinction, education falls under the category of the social, government’s role is to limit the inequalities that educational benefits create. Paine’s concern with government’s role in limiting social inequalities establishes a governmental responsibility to limit the difference between the basic educational experiences of the richest and poorest students. His interest in knowledge as the basis of governmental legitimacy raises the stakes of the government’s role in schooling insofar as education produces benefits for both the individual and for society that are unlike others. For the individual, the benefit of education allows for the representation of private interests in the public sphere in such a way as to limit virtually all other forms of inequality. For society, extending this benefit to all increases each person’s capacity to represent his interests publicly, thus promoting the rule of law and aiding the work of government in limiting other forms of social inequality. Elucidating the appropriateness of Paine’s voucher proposal to his views on democratic government also demonstrates the mistake of claiming Paine as the intellectual founder of the contemporary voucher movement. Contemporary voucher plans fail Paine’s stated requirements because rather than preserving the government’s responsibility of limiting excesses of inequality in society, contemporary voucher programs would relinquish government authority, in the form of tax revenue, to competitive private organizations that have neither an interest in promoting common goods nor the authority to minimize inequality. Conclusion Current debate on educational equity swings between the cynical view that equity can be measured in dollars regardless of the recipient’s ability to make use of the lessons they learn and the naive view that a good teacher can overcome the effects of intergenerational poverty. Both of these views are stuck in the idea of education as a means of distribution: one as a begrudged duty and the other as a gift. Both forget that the end of education is not the delivery of a good to a group of individuals, but the social change that results. Paine’s corrective to current voucher plans helps us articulate the question: Do other government powers serve to limit social inequality, or do schools work in opposition to the inequalities generated by other effects of the law? McClintock (2004) and Weithman (2010) have each offered new ways of seeing educational justice beyond the constraints of a distributional view. Both take the limits of educational distribution as their starting point, and both suggest, as Paine’s work does, that schooling inequality is merely an indicator of a larger educational injustice, in which the development of agentic democratic citizens is thwarted through a systemic cultivation of despair. McClintock coins the term ‘formative justice’ to describe the measure of agency a person has been granted through their education in steering his or her life toward a goal of completion. Weithman similarly coins the term ‘motivational adequacy’ to describe the degree to which a person has faith that the institutions to which he or she is subject will provide the skills or direction necessary to achieve some kind of success. Both take a view of education that extends beyond the school, and both are indirectly supported by a varied collection of social theorists (Anyon, 1997, Durkheim, 1997, Ravitch, 1983) who see schooling saddled by expectations of equity that cannot overcome the inequities produced by overarching social and political forces. 4 Just as Paine viewed school vouchers as one more way that government could contribute to minimizing social inequality, we might ask how education, as the cultivation of agentic human subjects, might be achieved with greater equity through a variety of social avenues that are not only susceptible to governmental influence, but also capable of being restructured according to the demands of concepts such as formative justice and motivational adequacy, so that the work of schools is not taken up in isolated opposition to everything else the social world has to offer. Without this extension of educational thinking beyond the distributional metrics of school funding, the democratic promise of universal schooling will only amount to empty rhetoric. References Anyon, Jean. (1997) Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform. New York: Teachers College Press. Bierlein, L.A. (1993) Controversial issues in educational policy. Newbury Park: SAGE Publications. Browne, B., Kinsey-Barker, P., Martin, D. “Vouchers: An Initiative for School Reform?” In Issues Challenging Education. Retrieved September 4, 2013, from http://horizon.unc.edu/projects/issues/papers/Voucher.html Cookson, P. W. (2004) "School Vouchers." Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society. 2004. Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved September 2, 2013, from http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2- 3402800362.html Coulson, A. (n.d.) Retrieved December 31, 2012, from http://www.schoolchoices.org/roo/classics.htm Durkheim, Emile (1997) Suicide: A Study in Sociology. The Free Press. Kirkpatrick, D. W. (1990) Choice in schooling: A case for tuition vouchers. Chicago: Loyola University Press McClintock, R. (2004) Homeless in the House of Intellect: formative justice and education as an academic study, In Explorations in Education. Retrieved September 2, 2013, from http://studyplace.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/files/McClintock/2005-Homeless-Intellect-McClintock.pdf McMillan, Leah K. (2010) “What's in a right? Two variations for interpreting the right to education.” International Review of Education, Volume 56, Numbers 5-6 (2010), 531-545. New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division (2006) Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. New York State, 29A.D.3d 175, 814 N.Y.2d 1. Paine, Thomas (1776) Common Sense. Retrieved September 4, 2013, from www.ushistory.org/paine/commonsense/ Paine, Thomas (1791). Rights of Man. Retrieved September 4, 2013, from www.ushistory.org/paine/rights/ Paine, Thomas (1794). The Age of Reason. Retrieved September 4, 2013, from www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/ Ravitch, Diane (1983) Forgetting the Questions. Retrieved September 2, 2013, from http://www.nais.org/publications/ismagazinearticle.cfm?ItemNumber=150948 5