One of the dangers of democratic politics in any age, but perhaps especially in the media age we inhabit, is the ease with which ideas, if repeated sufficiently often, can come to be taken for granted without careful reflection on their meaning or consequences. This is especially true in the realm of education. Everyone knows, after all, that “education” is a good thing, so it is difficult to object to anything advertised as promoting “more education.” Furthermore, educational proposals can always be cast as being “for the children,” an almost irresistible rhetorical trope. A century ago, discussing education in his book What’s Wrong With the World, G. K. Chesterton already had noticed this phenomenon: 

There has arisen in this connection a foolish and wicked cry typical of the confusion [about education]. I mean the cry, “Save the children.” It is, of course, part of that modern morbidity that insists on treating the State (which is the home of man) as a sort of desperate expedient in time of panic. This terrified opportunism is also the origin of the Socialist and other schemes. Just as they would collect and share all the food as men do in a famine, so they would divide the children from their fathers, as men do in a shipwreck. That a human community might conceivably not be in a condition of famine or shipwreck never seems to cross their minds. (1994, 139)

Apparently the appeal of fixing education for the sake of the children has been familiar to politicians and reformers for quite some time.

The conclusion of Chesterton’s comment may nevertheless not seem apropos, since in fact some of our communities do indeed seem to be in a condition resembling shipwreck, and many people regard the American educational system as failing in important respects. This worry continues to spark a number of reform proposals for improving education, from the lowest to the highest levels. Because they are intended to “save the children,” these proposals, even when they are controversial, are seldom questioned in a fundamental way; that is to say, while critics may worry that the reforms could be too expensive or too complex to implement, they rarely question whether these new ideas are well-intentioned and could indeed be helpful, if only we could afford them or overcome the various practical obstacles to their implementation.

Precisely because ideas, too often repeated, quickly become accepted as true, it can be helpful to throw light on them from an unexpected perspective, hoping to illuminate features that would otherwise remain concealed among the shadows. My goal here is to attempt precisely that with three popular education reform ideas, sketched here only briefly, all of which have garnered significant national attention within the last couple of years, and upon which a classic of the Western canon may shed some unanticipated light.

Universal Preschool

The idea of universal pre-kindergarten education is not entirely new. Oklahoma, for example, has a universal preschool program with very high enrollment levels. Such programs are also common in many foreign countries. Alia Wong, writing in The Atlantic, notes, “Many countries—including Japan, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and France—enroll nearly 100 percent of their 4-year-olds in preschool.” But the idea has received renewed attention in this country recently because of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s push to introduce universal pre-­kindergarten in New York City. (As is typical, the program is voluntary, not mandatory.) In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama, called for making $75 billion available over ten years in order to provide preschool for all. Shortly there­after, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, writing in the Washington Post in support of the president’s proposal, asserted, “If the United States is to remain a global economic leader, high-quality preschool must become the norm.” While evidence on the long-term effectiveness of early-learning programs remains inconclusive, defenders of such programs argue that poor and disadvantaged children, as well as those for whom English is a second language, are especially likely to benefit from them. Children in high-quality preschool programs, it is claimed, gain access to the more stimulating learning environments, with richer vocabularies and language skills, that wealthier and more privileged children may be able to take for granted.

Community College for All

At the opposite end of the educational ladder, President Obama has called on states to make two years of community college education available for free. The White House website describes the “America’s College Promise” proposal as a plan “to make two years of community college free for responsible students, letting students earn the first half of a bachelor’s degree and earn skills needed in the workforce at no cost” (White House). States such as Tennessee and Oregon have taken the lead with programs of their own, and Democrats in Congress have introduced a bill to make $90 billion available to the states to help pay for the president’s proposal. This reform is obviously motivated by a pair of twin concerns: the high cost of college education, increasingly seen as out of reach for many families, and the increase in the number of jobs requiring a college degree. If universal pre-­kindergarten is supposed to give children a head start on their education, free community college should ensure that they finish up with the qualifications they need for success in the marketplace.

Year-Round Schooling

As its name suggests, year-round schooling programs arrange for students to attend school across the entire year, dividing up the same number of schooldays into sessions spread throughout the year. The most common arrangement is called a 45-15 plan, in which students attend school for nine weeks, followed by a three-week break. With ever fewer students needed at home on the farm, there is less pressure to accommodate agricultural interests with long summer breaks, and school districts are better able to consider alternative schedules. While year-round schooling is not as prominent in the news as either universal pre-kindergarten or free community college, a number of school districts around the country—including districts in North Carolina, Oregon, and Michigan—have experimented with it. The chief educational benefits of year-round schooling are supposed to be students’ increased retention of what they have learned, thanks to shorter times off from school, and greater ability to supply remedial education when it is most needed. As with universal pre-­kindergarten, these benefits are thought to be especially advantageous for students from poor or disadvantaged backgrounds.

For a moment, consider these three reforms  as a unit. There is no reason, of course, why a proponent of any one of these need necessarily adopt the other two. Taken together, however, they provide an indication of which way the educational winds are blowing and the kinds of ideas likely to become received wisdom. Collectively these proposals present a composite vision that is striking. For if we start with the currently existing public school system, and then add onto it this trio of reforms, we get a somewhat remarkable result: a world in which children, starting at three or four years of age and extending until they are twenty-two or twenty-three, are removed from the home and placed in the care of a state institution on an almost year-round basis. Save the children, indeed! As Chesterton went on to say: “This cry of ‘Save the children’ has in it the hateful implication that it is impossible to save the fathers” (139). This trio of proposals implies, of course, that the current state of affairs is so dismal that we must now spread out our children’s education over the entire year and add roughly four years to it, almost a quarter of its current length. This, however, does not especially interest me here. Rather, I want to dwell on this image of ­children receiving instruction from the state for twenty years or so, until they are old enough to be released into the adult world of work and citizenship.

When one teaches political theory, as I do, for a number of years, one gradually realizes that students will respond in particular ways to certain texts. No such response is more predictable than that to Socrates’ proposals in Plato’s Republic for the abolition of the family and the communal education of children, a political program that students invariably regard as preposterous. In his ideal city, Socrates says that citizens, in the process of their education, “must be watched at every age to see if they are skillful guardians of this conviction” about what is “advantageous to the city” (Plato, 92). Therefore “we must watch them straight from childhood by setting them at tasks in which a man would most likely forget and be deceived out of such a conviction” (92). Later, describing the “second wave” of reform that the ideal city will need, he elaborates: “[T]he children, in their turn, will be in common, and neither will a parent know his own offspring, nor a child his parent” (136). From the youngest age, these citizens will all receive an education in common: “And as the offspring are born, won’t they be taken over by the officers established for this purpose... [and brought] into the pen to certain nurses who live apart in a certain section of the city” (139)?

This is, I suppose, the first proposal for universal preschool. In thus pointing toward the educational reforms of the Republic, I certainly do not mean to suggest that proponents of universal preschool, or free community college, or year-round schooling—or even all three—are intentionally setting out to remove children from their families or remake them in the way that Socrates describes, as a kind of mass socialization effort. Obviously, that is not the goal of most educational reformers. Nor do I wish to pretend that if only we left children in their homes instead of sending them off to school, then everything would be fine. Nevertheless, it is worth letting ourselves be brought up short for a moment by this unexpected resemblance. Surely it says something interesting about our age that a set of familiar, widely-shared educational proposals should turn out to display such a striking likeness to the scheme that my students have routinely regarded (at least until now) as outrageous, a scheme that even led the philosopher Karl Popper famously to place Plato among the enemies of the open society.

It is, of course, the danger of received wisdom, of ideas that get repeated over and over until we take them for granted, that we become blind to certain aspects of them and less able to see them in another light. Those received opinions are—to borrow from Plato again—the shadows on the walls of our own cave. The Republic illuminates that cave in this instance by the shock of recognition it provides, by suddenly allowing us to see familiar ideas for something quite different, and perhaps less appealing, than we imagined them to be. Even our best intentions and noblest motives do not always produce the desired outcomes; and even when they do, those outcomes sometimes turn out not to have been truly worth desiring in the first place. What’s Wrong With the World (originally published in 1910) contains a chapter entitled “The Outlawed Parent.” In it, Chesterton complains that “[t]he only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents” (170). One hopes that in our efforts to save the children, we do not arrive at that point without having ever understood the destination toward which our steps were heading.

Peter Meilaender is Professor of Political Science at Houghton College.

Works Cited

Chesterton, G. K. What’s Wrong With the World. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994.

Duncan, Arne. “High-Quality Preschool is a Sure Path to the Middle Class.” The Washington Post, April 18, 2013.

Plato. The Republic. Allan Bloom, ed. and trans. New York: Basic Books, 1968.

White House. “Fact Sheet: White House Unveils America’s College Promise Proposal: Tuition-Free Community College for Responsible Students.” January 9, 2015. http://www.whitehouse.gov.

Wong, Alia. “The Case Against Universal Preschool.” The Atlantic, November 18, 1964.