Mann v. Gatto the Early Public School

Mann v. Gatto

The early public school reformer Horace Mann celebrated the institution of the public school as a profoundly democratizing force in American life. Mann believed that without public schooling, America could not become a true democracy. Public schooling enabled even the children of paupers to work hard and to gain a foothold in the middle class (Badolato 2011). Schools could provide students with technical expertise which would also make for a more productive society and also a more equitable society. Mann's philosophy is still seen today in the discourse about education, when it is bemoaned that so many students graduating college with liberal arts degrees are not 'marketable' despite their high levels of college debt. Instead of teaching learning for learning's sake, Mann believed that education had a social mission to empower people economically.

In contrast, the contemporary conservative educational theorist John Taylor Gatto views the public educational system as a socializing tool of the state, rendering students into compliant subjects. Gatto is an advocate of homeschooling, versus the collective social institutionalization of Mann. Gatto says that much of modern education is tedious, rote, and dull (Gatto 2003). Schools function mainly as 'sorting' mechanisms rather than democratizing institutions. Although some of Gatto's outrage about class might please the liberal Mann, ultimately Gatto has a libertarian vision of every family personally nurturing every individual child, away from any kind of larger social schooling structure.

Both elements of Mann and Gatto can be found in modern schools today: there are certainly examples of persons from poor families who became doctors, lawyers, and engineers thanks to the support they received from the public schools and their colleges. There are also examples of students who 'fall through the cracks' and are bored with the curriculum like Gatto suggests. One of the reasons children seem to be 'left behind' is due to social factors other than schooling, such as poverty and a lack of support from home that no standardized testing programs like No Child Left Behind can cure, and which makes pulling one's self up by one's own bootstraps a la Mann impossible. Yet homeschooling hardly seems like a viable alternative: schools must be more individualized, but we still need the institution to provide an education the family often cannot provide.

Q2. Proposition 8

Proposition 8 was a popular mandate passed in California banning same-sex marriages. The Proposition was constitutionally problematic from the inception. First of all, there is the issue of opening up civil liberties of any minority group to a popular mandate. If, during the civil rights movement, there had been a popular mandate about the question of whether African-Americans should have the right to vote and to non-segregated schooling, that mandate would have failed. Limiting marriage to one type of person -- heterosexuals -- seems inherently discriminatory, regardless of what 'the people' might think as a whole.

Secondly, there is a problem regarding the banning of a certain kind of marriage by a state. In some states, gay marriage is legal. What happens if someone from a state where marriage is legal moves to California? Does this mean that suddenly the couple becomes 'unmarried?' If the state must recognize it, and give full benefits to same-sex partners, this creates a hierarchy between couples who leave the state to get married vs. those who do not.