Albert Mohler:
This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them. I’m Albert Mohler, host and president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
Rita Koganzon is associate director of the program on constitutionalism and democracy at the university of Virginia, where she also serves as an assistant professor of politics. She received her PhD in government from Harvard University and has pursued academic research in the fields of education, childhood, and the role of the family in contemporary political thought. The topic of our conversation today is her new book, Liberal States, Authoritarian Families, in which she surveys the ideas of political liberalism and its relationship with the authority of parents in the home.
Professor Koganzon, and welcome to Thinking in Public.
Rita Koganzon:
Thanks for having me.
Albert Mohler:
I really find your book fascinating. And I find a way to, I think find most books, but yours in a particular way, because reading your book took me through not only a fascinating question of the early modern age with the deep relevance to our own, but it made me think about the way I’ve been reading several of the sources of the modern age in particular Locke and Rousseau and others. There has to be a story behind how you got to this project and I’d love for you to tell it.
Rita Koganzon:
Well, I got to this project when I was in college. I mean, I’ve always been interested in education and I studied American history in college. So I wrote on the history of American education for my thesis. But then I thought, this is coming, all these people are citing Locke, and so this is all coming from somewhere. And so I read Emil and some thoughts concerning education. And I thought it was very puzzling, especially some thoughts concerning education, how at the very beginning, he sort of says, “You have absolute authority over your children.” And if you’ve ever read the second treatise that’s not how he really talks about politics, right? The whole point of the two treatises of government in effect is to overturn this idea of absolute power that anybody could have absolute power in politics.
And it was very strange that he begins the thoughts concerning education, just simply saying, “Your child should treat you as their absolute governor.” And so I was interested in that paradox and I was interested in general about how early liberals can conceived of parenting child rearing and education, because it seemed to me that everything that I read that was contemporary on these questions wasn’t going to lead to any good result. And I wondered if this had been a problem from the outset that liberalism was conceived with a kind of foolish idea about how to raise children and how to educate them, or whether this was a kind of misinterpretation or misunderstanding that sort of weasel its way in later. So I decided I would take a look.
Albert Mohler:
Well, you ended up writing your dissertation at Harvard on this issue. And then your book Liberal States, Authoritarian Families, childhood and education, and early modern thought, just kind of recently from Oxford University press. So there has to be a sense of satisfaction in having worked through not only the doctoral project and the dissertation, but now a finished academic work.
Rita Koganzon:
I think hopes that their dissertation will one day be published or publishable , and so it’s very satisfying when that finally happens.
Albert Mohler:
Right. And to be honest a lot of dissertations that eventually are published probably shouldn’t have been, but yours is really fascinating in that. I had to rethink John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and how they consider not only the ordering of society in the early modern age, but also the raising of children and deeply concerned about the family. I found the premise of your study very interesting and to be honest, I have to say in reading both Locke and Rousseau and others, I could say, I really hadn’t paid enough attention to the role of the family in their thinking and even the role of the father but the parents and the child, and yet this was a crucial issue in the enlightenment age.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah. I mean, it was a crucial to issue even before that in the English Civil War, because Locke is responding to these patriarchal theories of government, right?
Albert Mohler:
Right.
Rita Koganzon:
They’re not just patriarchal theories of the family that goes without saying, but the argument of people like Robert Filmer, who was his sort of opponent in the two treatises, Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbs, these other important absolute thinkers was that you could model the State on the family. And that would mean modeling the power of the King or the sovereign on the power of this father, so that he held a kind of patriarchal power at large. So patriarchal power had, or paternal power had this important political valance that today we obviously don’t consider because we don’t have a Royal government.
Albert Mohler:
Well, we don’t consider it, but it’s yet deeply rooted. For instance after I read your first few chapters, I thought I’d like to go back in the history of governance even in the classical sources, and just wonder to the extent to which patriarchal or fatherly images are very much a part of rule, whether it’s well articulated it and rationalize the fact is I think there has been, and I think it could be documented pretty easily a transference of the model of the family, to the model of government eventually the emergence of the State. It’s there somewhere.
Rita Koganzon:
Oh, it’s there in Plato’s Republic.
Albert Mohler:
Right.
Rita Koganzon:
I mean, if you think about Plato’s Republic, what it is it ultimately, but one big family, right?
So we have this community of women and children. Everybody is your mother and father, every other child is your brother and sister. So that the whole goal is kind of to reduce politics to one big family. And that was understood I think by most political philosophers, not to be an actual desire that we should pursue, but in almost kind of dystopian fear, right? That this would be the extreme destruction of politics as if we turned it into a family. And I mean, there are other many people make the analogy of the King and the father, the King should be kind of paternal. The King should love his subjects like his children but it’s actually not until Jean Bodin in the 16th century that you get somebody arguing that the power of the King is modeled on the power of fathers.
Often you’ll see arguments like, King should rule in interest of their subjects in the way that fathers raise their children in the interest of their children. They’re these kind of loose analogies. But rarely does anybody say, well, the King is just like your father and moreover, like your father should have more power than we legally give him so that he can better be like better model the King’s power.
Albert Mohler:
Right. Well, but then his position his you say, is rather extreme giving the father power of life and death over his children, at least in theory. But just in terms of the rise of government in the State, at some point even in the medieval world, the State gained a monopoly on the power of life and death. And so in that sense, the State was interposed between the child and the parents in that sense. The theory that ought to be reversed, it doesn’t gain much traction, but Locke clearly does come back and say, well, but still the authority of the family is to be respected. And especially when it comes to the second responsibility of raising children which is to educate them.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah, I think that, what Locke sees is actually a kind of product of liberalism, right? Or nascent incipient liberalism and we wouldn’t say the 17th century was fully liberal, but he’s sort of imagining a world that is based on natural rights and based on this idea of natural equality and natural liberty. And so there’s all these limitations, when you read the two treatises, he has all these limitations on paternal power, parental power. That’s the first limitation is, it’s actually not just paternal power, but it’s shared between mothers and fathers. And so he calls it parental power. So that already limits its scope and to a great extent. The age of majority, at the age of majority, your parents have no longer any control over you, if you don’t want them to. And that’s decisive and they don’t get a say, I mean, they can choose to give you less inheritance if they don’t like you, but they also can’t deny you in inheritance entirely.
If they have an inheritance to give you, they owe you the means to sustain yourself. And those are obvious limitations on parental, paternal come parental power. But there’s this other problem, which is that once we have just established all of the other authorities that existed in the sort of in the middle ages, in the early modern period, the authority of the church, the authority of the universities, or of scholastic thought and all of these sort of institutions, the aristocracy is another big one. Public opinion becomes actually quite powerful, right?
In a way that it never was before, because public opinion would sort of wash up on the shows of these various institutions, which had these enormous formative effects on people. And instead you have this kind of mass public opinion potentially. And so now you need education for a different purpose. You don’t need education so that children can learn what their father’s power looks like, and then analogize it to their sovereigns power, but you need education so that they can withstand public opinion and have some hope of actually attaining to this kind of that’s being promised by liberalism before it’s foreclosed by sort of the conformism that is imposed on you in a sort of mass society.
Albert Mohler:
Right. And just to be clear when you’re speaking about liberalism, you’re speaking about classical liberalism, the modern project of ordered liberty and the most formative thinkers, at least in the English speaking tradition here with Hobbs and Locke. And then of course the influence of Rousseau in the English speaking tradition. I’ve always thought of Locke and Rousseau as to be contrasted-
Rita Koganzon:
Everyone does.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. And there’s a sense in which even after reading you, I’m convinced that there’s a basic sense on which that’s right. But I’ll tell you one of the things you convinced me of, is that when it comes to the enemy of liberty to be considered in the raising of children, in both cases it really is the power of public opinion. The power of public opinion is a new despotism.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah. I mean, Tocqueville to is really the thinker who articulates that most fully, I think for Americans in Democracy in America, which is kind of beyond the scope of my book. So I finished in the 18th century, Tocqueville’s obviously writing in the 19th. But he has a whole account of the way that public opinion and democracy works when there’s kind of no boundaries. And everybody feels that they have a kind of equal access to truth because we’re all equal in principled. So why should something that I don’t know? And the result of that is a kind of epistemological sense that like, we all know the… If everybody has access to the same amount of truth and the same amount of information, then truth is likely to be on the side of the majority, because there’s just more of them and they agree.
So why shouldn’t we take that to be the truth itself? And Locke and Rousseau are less developed on this question. I mean, Tocqueville obviously very influenced by Rousseau when he’s writing about this, but they already start to see this problem. They call it the power of fashion, the power of reputation, sometimes they call it custom. But it’s these kind of informal pressures on people that are strengthened when you get rid of the formal institutions that used to reign them in. And especially the formal decentralizations that used to reign them in.
Albert Mohler:
It’s also very interesting to see, and I think parents today would find very interesting both John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau when it comes to for instance education and the parents’ role in education. And then also what happens in adolescence because both Locke and Rousseau recognized that at some point, at some point the parents having been more or less sovereign in the education of their children, they’re going to have to face the fact that their children are going to end up in a peer culture. And that peer culture is going to be, you think about the conversation today about social media and all the rest, but the point that both Locke and Rousseau recognized is that, that peer culture is going to be, if anything, more powerful than the parental culture.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, so kind of inverts Locke in his account of Emil to say like, “Well, we can stop this if you did it correctly.” But it’s a little preposterous what he’s proposing, right? He says, “Well, and stop all desires from forming until age 30, if you monitor the children closely enough.” And so that’s supposed to be, I mean, we have to sort of think about what is Locke, what is Rousseau trying to do with Locke when he makes these sorts of criticisms. But Locke is very clear that he says, there’s this boiling boisterous time of youth which is adolescences. And nobody’s, boy are not interested in listening to the authorities that they previously had respected and you need to expect that. And so you’ve got to build them up before then, so that they’re prepared for that time so that they can at least experience some kind of dissonance between what their peers are demanding of them and what their family had raised them with.
And they have to experience what’re or family has raised them with as actually really pleasant so that they can think about it as like, well, now there’s a real sort of tug of war inside of me between this thing that I loved about my family, right? And then these, this thing that my peers are expecting of me, which should I choose. Whereas if you don’t do that, they will automatically go with their peers. If you get your children to resent you, right? Then they’ll say, that’s terrible way my parents raised me and this wonderful thing that my peers are luring me towards.
Albert Mohler:
Well, I appreciated Locke’s insight here when he talked about the fact that for instance, you were talking about boys primarily here, the education of boys as a cultural priority in a way that wasn’t for girls in the era. But he seems to understand that things are easier when the child is younger and the parents are basically sovereign in the education of their, and he thinks it should be that way. And I appreciate the fact that Locke understands that there really is no alternative to respecting the singular role and rights and responsibilities of parents and the raising of young children. But he continues that through what we would consider school age, because he fears something more than for instance, the influence of say bad or inadequate parents. And that is the tyranny of peers and says basically that, there are people that overthrow the tyranny of parents and the education of their children, but the worst tyranny is the tyranny of the other children, other boys, peers.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah, that’s right. I mean, he has this kind of consideration in some thoughts concerning education, should you send your child to a boarding school? I mean, that’s the only option at the time of one of these private boarding schools, like the kind that Locke went to, he went to Westminster or should you keep them at home and hire a tutor or do the tutoring yourself, and he sort of weighs the pros and cons and says, well, ultimately like you can learn maybe better Greek and Latin in a school, but are you willing to sacrifice your child’s moral upbringing for a little bit of Greek and Latin and the terrible way that boys will teach them how to become treacherous and manipulative, and that this is the way that you get along with other boys in a school, and that’s what your child is going to learn versus keeping him at home, making him a little bit naive perhaps, but that can be corrected once he enters society. And whereas the manipulativeness as he calls it, the tricking, the malpracticeness and tricking of boys is much harder to stamp out once it’s ingrained.
Albert Mohler:
Right. And of course you, this is a precursor to a lot of the social thinking, even in the 20th century that has drawn analogies between the behavior of children in a school situation and what we could call the tyranny of public opinion then, and the same patterns in mass politics in the 20th century.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah. I mean, actually one of the people who picks up on this is Hannh Arendt. When she writes in the 20th century on, she has an essay called the Crisis in Education that she writes in 1958, 1959. And she has a whole passage on, well there’s a kind of progressive, progressive education has this kind of ideal that there’s this children’s world and what adults should do is just step out of it and let the children govern themselves because in their purity and beauty, they will come up with something better than if we impose our authority on them. And she says, “What will they come up with?” They’ll come up with tyranny of the majority, right? Because they had no reason and they have no judgment, and all they do is pursue fashions and they inflict them on each other. And you have this kind of gross conformism that has not even a mind at the top. And that’s what you’re going to subject children too. And she says, that’s an authority far worse than any adult authority, because adults are at least reasonable, they can be reasoned with and they can interpose themselves between these kinds of peer relationships. And she does see that as a kind of model for mass society that’s very troubling.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. Well, and of course she’s writing over against the horrors of the 20th century and mass culture that produced everything from, well, most importantly the fascism in Italy and in Germany in the first half of the 20th century. So she knows of which she’s speaks, and this is not a hypothetical hear.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah, I mean there, it’s actually quite interesting. She’s just arguing about American education, right? So she’s not saying like, look, this is going to lead to totalitarianism or something like that. She’s just take sort of critiquing progressive education and says, what is really going to lead to is just a kind of a lack of education if people will not be educated, right? And that there’s a problem with democracy and especially American democracy, it’s orientation towards new things and newness that it wants to embrace progressive education because that two points to the future. And she says, the real difficulty in education is understanding that education is about pointing backwards. And it’s about the old, that’s the thing you have to educate children to. They’re going to be new on their own that you don’t have to make them new because the fact of their individuality is already there. Every child is a new thing, a new individual in the world.
So you don’t have to educate them into that. What you have to educate them into is the Western tradition, because that’s the thing that is not in any way going to be obvious to them. And so she’s actually, I mean, she’s a liberal she’s a socialist in many respects, but she sees education as a kind of weakness of liberalism, which is that liberals tend to want a kind of forward looking anti-authoritarian education because that aligns with their political values, which are also anti-authoritarian. But that that’s actually a mistake in the realm of education and children, because you’ve got to sort of invert your priorities there, and you have to sort of diverge from the principles that govern your regime in order to correctly educate a child for that regime.
Albert Mohler:
So if I take your project with at least in my mind Locke and Rousseau as your major conversation partners, there are others. But but Locke and Rousseau are at the center. Locke being English, British I guess perhaps we would say now, and understanding the necessity of trying to articulate how liberty would work over against dictatorship, autocracy, absolutism, he sees the family as an asset. He sees the family not he as an asset, but as necessary. He sees parents as the governors in the first government and education is primarily their responsibility. The role of the father is to prepare a son to be ready to, you could say function in the society as a citizen. That’s not really Locke’s term, but he’s very concerned that they’d be able to withstand public opinion and peer pressure and operate in a responsible adult way. Fair to say?
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah.
Albert Mohler:
Okay. So, but what Locke sees as essential in the role of parents and the family, Rousseau in his utopianism that frankly and more confused about now than, having read him for decades, he wants to abolish to family, but not quite, can you untangle that a bit?
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah. I mean, Emil’s a really complicated book for this reason, right? Because if you read like book one, it’s this, there’s this huge expectation there to parents, to mothers, you need to breastfeed and stop wet nursing, right? You have to pay attention to your own children, stop going to Paris, stop trying to pursue your intellectual and social life. You have to turn inwards towards your family and take care of your family. And then to fathers, the same kind of exhortation, teach your own children. And then it kind in the middle of book one, he abruptly says like, “Okay, but you’re not going to listen to me.” So I’m going to show you how to educate a child by getting this hypothetical boy, Emil, he’s totally average in every way, and getting him this hypothetical tutor, myself, John Jock and I’m going to go through for the next 400 pages, what it would take to educate this child according to nature.
And then at the very end in book five, there’s infamously book five much reviled. If you go on Amazon, then see the ratings of Emil. He gives you this education of girls of women, and the education of women, so he gives you this ideal, woman’s Sophie, who’s supposed to become you know, Emil’s wife and the education that he proposes for women is at home with their parents who don’t seem to require much convincing to educate Sophie. They’re like a loving country family, and so it’s very puzzling, it’s like, what is Emil doing? Like, what is the purpose of this book if it’s structured in this way? And I think that what’s happening is, I mean, he gives you this utopian account of a Emil’s education. It’s totally impossible to replicate. I mean, even from the outside, he says, well every boy needs a tutor and the tutor can only tutor one boy.
So, and he is basically has to commit to this child for life. So if you just think of about the demographic necessity, there it’s that all Frenchmen would be entailed to tutoring one French boy, and they would never be able to do anything else. There’d be no economy or country or anything. It’s a nation of tutors. So it’s obviously impossible, the things that the tutor is expected to do are impossible. I mean, he controls Emil’s entire environment, every single detail of it, right? No tutor can realistically do that. He sort of manipulates everybody in the neighborhood and engages them in these elaborate sort of scenarios for Emil to walk into so that they can become educative for him. You know, nobody can do that. He keeps Emil in sexual innocence until he is, proposes to do it until he is 30. So that’s also a challenge.
So all of that stuff is impossible. Sophie’s education is the way that Rousseau frames it, he says like, this is an oppression, this is an empire over women, and so it sounds terrible. And that’s how people take it, I think commonly, but it’s actually totally doable. And what it is is Locke’s education. It’s just for a girl and Locke himself says, this education that I’m writing, I’m going to use a boy, but it could be a girl, and only a little bit would have to be changed around for the necessities of sex. But everything basically would be the same. So he’s kind of taking Locke at Locke’s word and he’s giving him a girl and the girl is Sophie and she turns off pretty well. And so that also, I think, adds to the puzzle of what Emil is.
Albert Mohler:
But you can, you can draw a line at least in terms of cause and effect plausibly between John Locke and the American revolution. In fact, you can’t explain the American revolution without John Locke. You can’t explain even a figure like Roger Williams. In other words, the more we learn, the more we learn how much these figures were reading John Locke and whether they were agreeing with him or synthesizing him, but in some sense, Locke’s a part of that conversation of ordered liberty that produces come constitutional government even a constitutional monarchy in Britain and ordered liberty in the constitutionalism in the United States. But then in contrast, you draw a line from Rousseau to absolutism and a radical revolution. And so the education’s a part of that. Your work really made me kind of rethink what Rousseau said about education, but I end up thinking more or less the same thing about Rousseau and cause and effect.
Rita Koganzon:
So I think Rousseau is easy to misread in the ways that he has been misread, because he’s a very difficult thinker and it’s easy to seize on what you like and say like, “Ah, this must be what he means for me” but what I think Rousseau is doing, not just in Emil, but in a lot of his works is kind of extending the philosophical logic of the people that he’s critiquing, Hobbs in the social contract, Hobbs and Locke is also the target in the social contract. And in Emil it’s Locke’s education. What he’s trying to do with Emil, I think is to that if Locke were totally consistent in his own philosophical principles, the result would actually have to be a Emil’s education, but it’s impossible, bad news. So then in the end, he sort of capitulates to Locke and Sophie is Locke’s education.
And I think you can see this in a few places in Emil. One is the problem of consent. So we are familiar with the problem of consent from the second treatise. You have to consent to your government, right? No government is legitimate unless you’ve consented to it. Well, what does it mean then to say that you can impose your absolute authority over a two year old, right? You have kind of abrogated the possibility of consent there. And that’s what Locke says. Locke says you impose your authority on the child immediately in infancy. And so Rousseau says, “Well, that’s not really legitimate. It doesn’t really follow from your principal’s Locke. So let me show you what it would take to make an education that does follow from your principal, where you never impose authority on the child until the child is at the age of reason as able to sort of willingly voluntarily accept that authority.”
And so he creates this elaborate scheme in which the child always thinks that nature and necessity are what’s governing him and never feels the government of a human being. He never feels a human will, right? It’s very difficult to make that possible, but that is philosophically consistent. So that by adolescence that’s when Emil in Rousseau’s account, would, he comes to the realization, “Oh, the tutor has helped me. The tutor has raised me. The tutor has saved me so many times. Of course I will accept the authority of the tutor. I have made a rational calculation that this person is working in my interest.”
Albert Mohler:
But this is that radical utopianism whereby the child is always supposed to think he’s in charge. And the task of the tutor is to teach the child in such a way that the child always thinks he wants what the tutor wants him to want.
Rita Koganzon:
Right. It’s not possible, but philosophically it’s consistent.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah.
Rita Koganzon:
And I think that’s what Rousseau is trying to show in the same way that Plato’s Republic is not about like step by step, here’s how to set up the best regime. But if you want complete justice, this is what complete justice would require. Now, let me ask you, do you want complete justice, right? And so I think Rousseau is doing something similar with Emil by saying, “Look, Locke is philosophically contradictory. If we really ironed out the philosophy here, all the premises and made them logically consistent, it would require this education that I’m showing you with Emil. Do you really want that? Is that really the education that we want to pursue? Okay. If not, then we have the second best option, which is Sophie. Sophie is practicable, but she is very contradictory” right? And so it’s a kind of, you could say the education of Emil is a study in human nature, right?
It’s a kind of philosophical study in human nature. It’s not intended to be seized on and used as a curriculum. As many pedagogues, reading Emil tried to do immediately after Emil was published. And you could say the whole tradition of progressive pedagogy from Basedow and Peselozio, and all of these people in Europe to John Dewey in the United States is descended from this reading of Emil, which is like, Emil’s education is the best education. You should build a school that trains little Emils, even though Rousseau says don’t fail to school.
Albert Mohler:
Right.
Rita Koganzon:
You can’t train children in schools.
Albert Mohler:
Right. Yeah. The interesting thing that strikes me in, because Progressive’s education is such a major factor in the 20th century, especially in the United States. And I was raised in that context. But in a conservative family, and so that’s why the title of your book by the way, immediately caught me. So I’m in a conservative family, in a conservative church, but in thrown into a situation of progressivist education, and so I’ve tried throughout much of my adult life to understand what that entire educational project was about. And when you get to someone like John Dewey. Dewey basically is about creating mass opinion. To me it seems like that’s a rejection of Rousseau, but I guess he claims Rousseau is an authority.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah. I mean, you can misunderstand Rousseau in so many ways because Rousseau is trying to write to all kinds of different impulses and desires, right? So there’s the kind of the impulse of the Spartan in us, right? That wants the perfect Republic that wants to be a full citizen, right?
Albert Mohler:
Yeah.
Rita Koganzon:
And he says, “Okay, you want that? Here’s what it would take.” It would take the social contract, or it would take even maybe more than the social contract. And then there’s the impulse of the kind of solitary person because I want to disengage from society. I want to be just my own person. I want to like be one with nature or just philosophies, and that’s the Reveries of a Solitary Walker, right? So he sort of gives you these different options, or do you want to live in a commercial regime in a way, Emil, Julie, the Letter to d’Alembert. These are the books that show you about how can you live a relatively morally philosophically consistent life within this essentially corrupt society around you, right? Without either retreating from it or trying to start a revolution to reform it.
And I mean, obviously the sort of absolutest stuff that comes out of Rousseau, the cause and effect that you were talking about, right? The French revolution, that’s people reading the social contract and saying, “Oh, he wants me to do this.” Right? But it’s never clear that Rousseau wants you to do this. It’s a lot more complicated than that. Sometimes he wants you to think about this, right? He wants you to think about what it would take to resolve all of these philosophical contradictions and then ask, is it really worth it in politics to do that, right? Do we want our politics to do that?
Albert Mohler:
You know, taking responsibility for ideas? And I understand what you’re saying and I was fascinated because you’re really bold to, in your work to by name, call out people you believe have misread Rousseau. And that’s what academic discourse is all about. It’s interesting but-
Rita Koganzon:
Well, John Dewey’s dead, so he can’t fight back.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah.
Rita Koganzon:
But yeah, he’s one of the misreads of Rousseau.
Albert Mohler:
Well, but with massive effect because if you look at the 20th and to the United States and you look at debates right now about the schools, I mean, it’s Thomas, excuse me, John Dewey, who makes the open argument that part of the purpose of the common school is to separate children from the prejudices of their parents. Basically the family is a problem. John Dewey is looking at all these immigrant families, the Irish Catholics, the Italian Catholics, but he’s also looking at the Luther and German families and others. And he’s saying we can’t have a decent nation if we don’t create mass opinion. And the obstacle to this common culture are these parents you got, I mean, after all Italian Catholic parents want to raise their children to be Italian Catholics and especially Catholic. So John Dewey poses this this secular humanism, which he calls it, I mean, he calls it that and Rousseau, he thinks is his is his champion.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah. I mean, so he also thinks Plato is his champion. And he says, “I’m going to modify each of these-”
Albert Mohler:
Arguably, he was.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah. I mean, it you have to modify a lot in order to turn out John Dewey.
Albert Mohler:
Right.
Rita Koganzon:
But yeah, I mean, I think its inevitable that philosophy will get misread this way. I mean, it’s hard to say this is Rousseau’s fault. I mean, it’s his fault for maybe writing ambiguously, but he was writing ambiguously in order to sort of speak to different audiences, right? To speak to people with these different sorts of desires and to try to show them what their desires philosophically entailed. And it’s hard to do that without sometimes opening yourself to misinterpretation, even if you write as clear as day, I mean, Locke is a very clear writer in many respects, but he’s been interpreted all kinds of ways. People have interpreted him as a socialist. People have interpreted him as some sort of sassanian, I mean all these Christian interpretations of him so nobody can prevent this from happening. You become important enough and people are going to want to claim you for their own cause. So I don’t know how much we should blame Rousseau for it, but I do think that that’s not the right way to read Rousseau and that we do have to take seriously what Rousseau’s, how Rousseau is trying to answer his predecessors.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. I think it’s also fair just in terms of the history of ideas to say this may be a misreading of X or Y, but nonetheless, this has been the dominant influence that has flowed into our culture in us. Whether John Dewey read Rousseau rightly or not, he was claiming Rousseau. And as you said, claiming Plato and the net effect is that the debates about education in America right now are as current as the debate between Locke and Rousseau.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah, that’s right. But I think you can take Rousseau back and I think you can show that this isn’t what Rousseau was about. I mean, Rousseau very clearly was not arguing for any kind of institutional schooling. So that in itself is a problem, almost all of progressive pedagogy is about forming institutional schools that can somehow produce these sorts of people. So I mean, there are many resources to argue back against this and I mean, I think it’s quite interesting that progressive education even liberals in the 20th century, again like a rent who are in other ways committed to the progressive project are skeptical of progressive education as the means to that project.
Albert Mohler:
Well at least you’re probably not going to like this at all, but I’ll just tell you that at least a part of what I’m thinking in this, is that the progressivist educators have wanted to think themselves like Emil’s tutor. They wanted to have that kind of role, but Emil turned on them. So the classical liberals that had been in so many ways, and I’d say, progressives within the educational order, they’re now finding themselves opposed by a far more progressivist generation that is not coming to the conclusion of Emil that this tutor was so benign.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah. Well, I mean, there’s a lot of stuff going on in the educational debates right now. I mean, so I’m in Virginia where we just had a gubernatorial election that maybe turned on this question of who has authority over children’s education.
And I mean, I think that the few people who are want to take back authority for parents are actually quite empowered at the moment and have a lot of leverage. So I don’t think it’s a hopeless cause. And I don’t, I mean, there’s a certain sense in which progressive education like preschool progressive education, right? It’s just ubiquitous and probably harmless because there’s not much that you’re going to teach two year olds or three year olds anyway, one way or the other. But I think that there is a real backlash against the effort to do this at every level and to get rid of tracking, to get rid of testing, to get rid of every single sort of benchmark of a achievement that would individuate people. It’s not obvious that the coalition that had been counted on to make this happen is actually the coalition that’s going to support it. I mean, you have a lot of immigrant parents and especially who are very opposed to all of these measures.
Albert Mohler:
And a lot of conservative Christian parents and this coalition of parents frankly, who don’t even think of themselves as having been politically activated, who all of a sudden were the suburban vote there in Virginia back in November. But it’s really interesting to me, I’m a Christian theologian. And so just as I see the issue of the family here in this context, I have to read it through the historic Christian understanding of subsidiarity and of the most basic units of society and the necessity of those basic units being respected and being healthy, if there’s to be health or respect at any abstracted level. And so when I look at this, I’m just saying, look with, just try having children without parents. That’s good luck with that. Just try educating children without the family, good luck with that. Try replacing the family with anything else, such as mass education under the control of the State, and I do not actually mean good luck with that, but I mean, it’s not going to work.
And it’s certainly not going to work according to the utopian schemes of the John Deweys’ and others. So when I picked up your book, I have to tell you, I’m just coming at it as an Orthodox Christian, classical Christian, thinking Locke is coming to terms with subsidiarity, he’s not talking about it because it’s, but he sees the family as organic and he understands you’re not going to have citizens unless parents do their work.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah. I mean, I think that is the liberal social contract state of nature tradition is that for the most part, except for Hobbs who through Rousseau then tries to answer, they argue that the family is natural precedes the State precedes any kind of social contract, right? And therefore has a kind of special standing among what you would call all subsidiary institutions, right, which is that it’s more sacred than the rest. The area institutions, right? Which is that it’s more sacred than the rest. The other ones are more conventional, right? So we could say, well, churches, they might perceive the state, they might not. We don’t know. Some of them clearly don’t. Other kinds of associations, right? You know, the Knights of Columbus, like clearly not a pre-state association but the family has a kind of valence that is much more inviolable by the government than these other ones. And then a lot grows out of the family, right? That extends its sort of reach.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. You know, I think also reading your book, I thought about arguments and you actually, I think at one point sight perhaps Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World. And I’ll tell you, I think a lot of the writings of Christopher Lasch on these issues, and others-
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah. Another socialist, who’s not on board with progressivism, right? In this particular realm.
Albert Mohler:
Right. Or you take someone like both Peter and Brigitte Berger, the sociologists who come to this and just say, “This is just how it works.” And yet, I mean, right now we are living through a period in which you do have open argument. I mean, I didn’t even think, Rita that we’d end up talking about the Virginia election. I know you’re there and I was there for the election. But you know, when the democratic candidate told, I don’t think Paris should have any role in this, we leave it to professional educators. I mean, your book could not have been better timed, just for that whole idea to emerge with cultural valence.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah. I mean, that’s true. I gave a talk like right after the election at the University of Richmond and was like, well, now I trendy so everything I say is totally relevant to current politics. I mean, it’s more complicated in the American case, right? Because we’re not talking about parents doing homeschooling, right? That battle has been fought and it seems to have been-
Albert Mohler:
Right. We’re not debating it, you mean?
Rita Koganzon:
Right. So I mean, the question of parents having control of their children’s education, if they choose to keep them home and educate them, that’s sort of a subtle question for now and I think for a while, right? That yes, if you want to pull your children out of school and provide a Lockean education for them at home, you’re certainly welcome to do that. But then the question becomes within the public school, which is governed democratically, right? And you as one family, don’t have a say over what other kids or what other families are going to get as their instruction. So there, there’s a kind of question over who controls the schools and how, and who determines curricula. And it’s not just a family, but now it has to be a majority of families, right? As represented on the school board, right?
So they’ve got to elect these people to the school board, who are going to represent their views. And then you can have a real question the educators versus the parents, right? Once you’ve got a majority on the school board that want something that the administration or the teachers or the teachers union doesn’t want. And so the American case is a little more complicated than that. Plus we have private schooling, we have these other institutional options for families that want to take control of their kids’ education. So it’s not quite the Lockean dilemma, It’s a more advanced version of what happens in a democracy, especially representative democracy.
Albert Mohler:
Sure. But you know, almost all of that was present in the early modern age. You had private education and in fact Locke was the, as you say, Westminster, the product of one of the most elite, one of the top six of the British boys schools, the so-called public schools, which were private and in France the same thing. And you’re probably very familiar with this, but the history in France was largely the church control of the schools and then the absolute secularization of the schools, and then the modern allowance that you might have private schools, but they have to be under the supervision of the state and this regime of professional educators, which neither Locke nor Rousseau could foresee.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah. I mean, the question of education in the 19th and the 20, the 21st Centuries, the United States really stands apart from developed countries in how decentralized our educational system is. I mean, it’s true that in Western Europe there are private schools but often they are run by the state, they’re subsidized by the state in many cases, right? So like, for example, in great Britain you can go to any kind of religious school for free because it’s subsidized by the state. But as one of my friends says of this arrangement, with State shackles comes State shackles.
Albert Mohler:
Absolutely.
Rita Koganzon:
So you get the funding, but then you-
Albert Mohler:
That is a very Baptist principle, I will tell you.
Rita Koganzon:
Well, except that the shackles are specifically Israeli currency, but it’s a basic principle hold, right? So yeah, I mean, so we have avoided that situation by saying, “We are going to have a realm of private schooling, which is going to not take any money from the State.” I mean, that’s not strictly true because they take some peripheral money but not any direct funding from the State and is going to be autonomous in its curriculum and administration from the State as a result. And one of the results of that is that we have this enormously decentralized system. We have private schooling that is more or less uncontrolled. I mean, there’s certification, some kind of regulation sometimes but ultimately you can start any school you want. There’s homeschooling, which is regulated to varying degrees from nothing at all to minimally. There’s this whole system of public schooling, which is run at the local level, which is a kind of unheard of idea in Europe and in other OECD country.
Albert Mohler:
But it’s still American.
Rita Koganzon:
It is very American.
Albert Mohler:
So American.
Rita Koganzon:
And I think it’s actually, it’s very Lockean. It’s a way of preserving this kind of Liberty, right? Because you’re decentralizing the control and so you’re decentralizing the force of public opinion on children, right? So yes, the children are subjected to the public opinion of their own town, city, area that they grow up in, but there’s 30,000 school districts. So at least it will not result in a national homogeneity of opinion and a national homogeneity of belief.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. And not long ago, I was looking at the actual school records of a school board in the west. And so this was in Oklahoma, but long before contemporary controversies. And the school board is not only hiring the principal, but establishing, which are the authorized books to be used? So it’s interesting. So many people right now are saying parents should never have this. Well, that’s actually where it began, the local citizens which are by and large parents were actually approving which books were to be used and this is prior to the evolution controversy, prior to any of that. So there it is.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah, I know. And I’m actually, I’m working on an article right now about this kind of school boards and book censorship in the schools and which this became a huge configuration in the 1970s, when you had conservative school boards asking for various books to be removed from the school library or removed from the school curriculum. And there, they did have this kind of urges of democratic authority because they were the elected school board and they had this historical right to do that. And the schools, the districts would go to court or the teachers would go to court over this. And their argument was, “This is censorship. Children have a right to read. You are abridging their right to read.”
And it’s really fascinating because in fact, it’s not censorship and children have no right to read because it’s just the teachers arguing with the parents, one group of adults arguing with another group of adults over what children should read, right? And so this whole argument that this is book censorship, which we still hear today. I mean, Loudoun County, I think, no, it wasn’t Loudoun, it was somewhere else in Virginia that had this controversy recently about approved books. You know, it’s censorship, but children are uniquely in a position where you can’t censor stuff that they’re reading because they don’t select their own reading material. They don’t go out and buy it themselves. They don’t determine what to read. Some adult somewhere is choosing for them. And so the real question is only which ones, the educators or the parents.
Albert Mohler:
And when you think about the American system, I think Americans who are paying attention probably were quite interested in the oral arguments in the main school case that came before the court early in December. And so it came down to the fact that Maine wants to have a public school system and really wants to limit children and taxpayer money to the public school system, but some of their counties are so sparsely populated, they can’t have a school and so instead they give the parents vouchers. And the question before the court is whether the state can uniquely prohibit the use of those vouchers in religious schools that teach religiously so to speak. But I’m thinking, that’s just exactly, again, these very issues being played out.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah, I know. I mean, we don’t have a final resolution of this, right? We have these other, I mean, especially the religious schooling and religious funding or funding of religious school question, because most of Europe doesn’t do what we do. They do fund religious schools. And that is an alternative-
Albert Mohler:
But control them to some extent.
Rita Koganzon:
Right. It comes with control. It also comes with a question of discretion, what counts, what deserves funding, right? So like you’re a Jewish school that we approve of maybe but then like, what if your Jewish school is like two Orthodox? And we don’t think that this meets our standards, right? Then we won’t fund that, right? So you raise a host of new problems by taking up the strategy.
Albert Mohler:
But that’s exactly the question before the court in this current case is because they say, “We’re not discriminating against religious schools, we’re just discriminating against religious schools that teach too religiously.”
Rita Koganzon:
Right. It’s a problem.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. it is indeed. And you know, as you’re speaking I’m thinking about Germany, which you raise because Germany yes, does allow religious schools, but has inordinate control over them. And then it officially legally criminalizes homeschooling.
Rita Koganzon:
Yes, that’s right. Homeschooling is very rare in OECD countries. It’s not something, I mean, it wasn’t even possible, well, technically legally possible in the United States until really the 1970s and 1980s. So we tend to think of like Little House on the Prairie types of education as being kind of standard in the United States, but they were not in fact standard. Most people from the 1860s onwards went to school and the state kind of got increasing control over that and past compulsory school laws and things like that. So homeschooling is new in some ways. It’s a new sort of reversion to something that we had forgotten or stopped, fallen out of use.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah. But you know, in the United States the religious schools were primarily Jewish and thus very, very small population. And then were primarily Catholic. And the Catholics came in teaching that Catholic children should be educated in parochial schools, that it was a parental responsibility that their children have a Catholic education. And so the public school conflicts in the Northeastern cities like Boston, Philadelphia and New York, in particular with Catholic parents were not over really choice but the Catholic church’s insistence in the parochial system. Protestants, including conservative Protestants, basically thought the common school, the public school system was great so long as the culture was conservative and Protestant. And so what’s really interesting is that homeschooling in the United States and the modern movement really began on the left in places like the Pacific Northwest with the unschooling movement.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah. It was a strange bedfellows movement, especially through the 1970s when it was being litigated of conservative Christians and hippies.
Albert Mohler:
Right. And it’s still kind of that way. They’re just far more conservative Christians in it now than there are hippies. And conservative Christians’ movement into homeschooling, which a big advocate of, is a sign, I think of the fact that what’s being rejected is this idea that schools are in an adversary relationship, the recognition that there is an adversary relationship with this professional educational system and Christian parents are saying no more of that.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah, I know. I mean, I think that’s right. There was always this kind of latent possibility of that when schools had to be at least in principal secular, right? So they were teaching a kind of secularized Protestantism for most of the 19th Century and probably a lot of the 20th Century in a lot of places. So that was always possible that they would take the secular and run with it. But it is also the case that many developments in education, especially in the 1960s in teacher training and teaching as a profession have made even the local public school often an adversarial place because the teachers, they’re not from the area, they don’t share the values of this area. And so they’re really out of sync with what the town or the district would want. And that’s sort of… You see these conflicts beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, and they’ve never really gone down because it continues to be an issue that teacher training is very different than what a lot of localities are expecting from their teachers.
Albert Mohler:
Right. Well, I really enjoyed your book at so many levels, but one of the things that I look for is the emergence of certain ideas and a different way of kind of tracking them. So actually in a very small reference in your book, you mentioned Alex Neill, and the idea of epistemological Liberty is linked to Locke. And so I’ll admit that, that sent me down a rabbit hole for a few hours. And back to Neill’s article and then back to other where he’s reading Locke, because this is really a small issue in your, but it’s a statement of appreciation. This is what makes a book like Liberal States, Authoritarian Family, so fascinating and profitable. Because one of the questions I’ve been trying to deal with for decades is when does this idea of a Liberty of thought, as like the grand organizing definition of humanity, when does that emerge? And Locke is crucial to that as is empiricism, the entirety of the early enlightenment but just a statement of thank you, just even a reference like that can be extremely helpful.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah. Neil’s article is really good. The essay concerning human understanding is a very difficult text and he’s really good I think at breaking down the arguments in it.
Albert Mohler:
What are you working on now? I know that having finished a book like this, that you finished it some time ago and I know something else is well underway.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah. I’m working on history of American education. And especially the idea of schooling in the United States, which is really an extension of this book. Why is it that Americans who, as you say, are very influenced by Locke in their politics, right? And then during the revolution and after in the constitutional debates, why don’t they take seriously his argument against schooling? And they just kind of go for schooling whole hog from the very beginning, from the 1780s, 1790s, you get all these treatises from people like luminaries, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, Noah Webster, all of these people writing about how we need to have a public school system. And it seems strange given how influenced they are by Locke, some of them are influenced by Rousseau as well, that they would embrace schooling so thoroughly. And so I sort of start with this question and I’m sort of looking at how it is that we understand schooling in the United States and whether we are concerned at all still about the warnings that Locke and Rousseau attached to schools.
And I’m arguing that we are, and we have a very strange approach to schooling, part of which is this decentralization, this allowance of homeschooling and stuff like that. But also that we hate school. We have a kind of cultural antipathy to schooling and like we treat teachers like teachers have low cultural status in the United States, given how much education they have at least ostensibly. And we have all of this kind of, you can see it in our popular culture and you can see it in our literary culture, this treatment of the school as a repressive place, that like your real education is a thing that happens outside of school or against school with your friends. And that’s really old. It goes back to Benjamin Franklin, you see it in Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Little Women.
Albert Mohler:
Sure.
Rita Koganzon:
And so I’m trying to examine what I’m calling this kind of hating school tradition in American thought. So that’s what my current book project is.
Albert Mohler:
Oh, for whatever it’s worth, I was just reading some of the writings of Jonathan Dickinson, the American founder who was kind of a farmer, but claimed to be more of a farmer than he actually farmed. Again, but he was writing about his own education and it’s very interesting. He recognizes how rare it was and both rests his argument on the authority of his education, but seems embarrassed by the fact that he recognizes that most people he was writing to wouldn’t have that education. And it just reminds me of, and especially with Franklin, who by the way, partnered with George Whitfield, the evangelist in some of this, including the university of Pennsylvania. The idea that a democracy can only be sustained if an adequate number of people have the education. If the elite alone are educated, then we’ll end up with an aristocracy just as formidable as the one we just overthrew.
Rita Koganzon:
Yeah. And Franklin’s solution is like, “Well, we’re all poor here. So we’re going to educate ourselves together.”
Albert Mohler:
Yeah.
Rita Koganzon:
And not through schools, although then he builds the schools. So he’s, in some ways the kind of birth of this tension of saying, “Well, we need schools.” Actually democracy just needs schools. There’s no other way. We can’t expect everybody to become a homeschooling parent. But you can’t take them too seriously and you can’t trust them much. And I think that’s kind of the weird American compromise that you don’t see really anywhere else, to some degree it’s in Britain because it has some of our background but not really anywhere else that you would just be really distrustful of the schools and kind of scorn them. And I love that about America. So I was a product of distrust of schools. My parents were like, you don’t have to go that often. They don’t really know what they’re talking about. So that’s what I’m working on now, is trying to kind of articulate this tradition and flesh it out.
Albert Mohler:
Well, the amazing thing about Americans is that they can imagine something on Monday, build it on Wednesday and be criticizing it by Friday.
Rita Koganzon:
That’s right.
Albert Mohler:
We operate fast in this country. Professor Koganzon, thank you so much for your book and for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure.
Rita Koganzon:
Thank you. Yeah. It’s been wonderful.
Albert Mohler:
Many thanks to my guest, Professor Rita Koganzon for thinking with me today.
If you enjoyed today’s episode of Thinking in Public, you will find more than 150 of these conversations @albertmohler.com under the tab, Thinking in Public. For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Voice College, just go to voice-college.com.
Thank you for joining me for Thinking in Public. Until next time, keep thinking. I’m Albert Mohler.