"In the schools and neighborhoods of inner-city Milwaukee, a great citizen insurrection is even now underway."
"Over the past decade, more and more of Milwaukee's inner-city parents have decided that they've had enough of sophisticated education methods that teach their children to be spontaneously creative, but that have somehow neglected to teach them to read and write," reports Michael Joyce of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. "They've had enough of the public schools' 'enlightened,' uninhibited moral atmosphere, which leaves their children helplessly exposed to the creative self-expression of drug dealers and armed thugs," he continues. "They've had enough of teachers and counselors who tell them, if they complain about their children's failure to flourish in these chaotic, liberated classrooms, that their children suffer from some arcane learning disability or pathology."
In the current issue of the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review, Joyce describes the futility of trying to fight the public education bureaucracy. "When these parents try politically to challenge this system within their school," he observes, "they rapidly discover that education is perhaps the segment of American life most assiduously organized according to the progressive science of management. Lines of accountability run ever upward and away from the neighborhood school, through layers upon layers of bureaucrats, to distant centers of power inhabited exclusively by insulated, arrogant professional elites."
If public school officials ignore criticism and the system remains impervious to improvement, what are parents to do? "With the help of privately and publicly funded vouchers, low-income parents all over Milwaukee are opting out of progressivism's school system," Joyce announces. "Many of them are turning instead to schools that believe the human self is less something to be expressed than to be shaped or molded, its impulses brought firmly under the tutelage of rigorous moral and religious doctrines. In these schools," he observes, "hallways are quiet and class-rooms orderly, because they are disciplined moral communities. Expectations for performance and behavior are elaborate and demanding."
Those expectations are also realized. "Students are treated with utmost respect even, or especially, when being disciplined, because they are understood to be responsible and accountable creatures of God," Joyce explains. "Although the schools reflect a variety of moral and religious traditions, they have a commitment to the education of self-governing citizens who are both morally self-disciplined and able to participate knowledgeably in the governance of the community and the republic. The schools, in turn, are centers of the surrounding community's public life and commitment to citizenship."
Milwaukee parents have resoundingly rejected "progressivism's program of self-liberation and management by insulated elites," Joyce concludes. When given a choice, they wisely choose "institutions that reflect the divinely inscribed and eternal character of human nature, that understand freedom to require moral self-mastery, and that root the child securely in at least one natural grouping that nurtures him and prepares him for a productive role in family, neighborhood, church, and voluntary association."
