fee | Hardly anyone disputes the contention that the modem public school is
seriously flawed. Test scores continue to be poor while metal detectors
are found in the more violent schools. Welfare-state liberals argue that
schools in poor areas need more money to place them on an equal footing
with their richer counterparts. Conservatives usually reply that the
solution is a voucher system that would break the government monopoly on
education by restoring choice and control to parents. But virtually all
participants on both sides of the debate concede the nobility of the
original reformers; in their view, the “good intentions” of such school
champions as Horace Mann and John Dewey led to “unintended
consequences.”
Such admiration is misplaced. As historian Michael Katz writes, “The
crusade for educational reform led by Horace Mann . . . was not the
simple, unambiguous good it had long been taken to be; the central aim
of the movement was to establish more efficient mechanisms of social
control, and its chief legacy was the principle that ‘education was
something the better part of the community did to the others to make
them orderly, moral, and tractable.’ ”1
