The Healing of Progressivist America: The Premises of School Desegregation within U.S. Civil Religion

Abstract

Durkheimian theory posits a thin line between civil religion and public educaticrn. Indeed, Durkheim thought the two were intimately related in modern societies. This article examines the premises of school desegregation as a healing ritual meant to cure the evils wrought by U.S. apartheid. Within the logic of Progressive Education, the idea was to ritually integrate the schools as a miniature melting pot. Operating both symbolically and as a social change agent, the cure would heal America. Meanwhile the policy's assimilationist assumptions discounted U.S. black culture as championed by W.E.B. DuBois. Research on its mixed effects and a new call for multiculturalism have undermined the Progressivist premises of desegregation. Public education's current confused state mirrors larger patterns ot nmythic struggle within U.S. society. A growing body of literature examines some nineteenth- and twentieth-century social movements' connections to religion. A nonexhaustive overview of some of these movements might include both sets of adversaries in the contemporary debate over abortion (cf. Maxwell and Spickard 1993; Cuneo 1989), militant survivalism (cf. Lamy 1992; Aho 1990), and nineteenth-century populism (Williams and Alexander 1994). This article considers another social movement whose religious assumptions have become largely invisible because they are so pervasive. My subject is educational Progressivism, particularly as exemplified in its most important twentieth-century innovation of desegregation. I take a distinctively Durkheimian approach. After outlining his view of religion's role in social change, I discuss Durkheim's view that public schools were the likely successors of formal religion in modern societies. Next, I consider the ways in which Progressivism was to restore America's virtue; this movement culminated in the ideology of public education as preserver of American culture. In these terms the Progressive schools were seriously threatened by the inequalities they perpetuated. Perhaps the most egregious inequity - the segregated and unequal education of African Americans - threatened to invalidate public education altogether. The logic of desegregation amounted to a ritual healing that employed the prescribed intermingling of black and white children. While the cure was to occur within classrooms, they represented all of U.S. society. Over time the connection would prove real as well as symbolic. Although much of the data used are historical, this analysis also includes contemporary research on the effects of desegregatltion. It concludes by discussing some of the implica