Alexis de Tocqueville is famous for his portrait of 19th-century America and his philosophic insights on why the American society has flourished -- and also where it might go wrong. It is worth the time to remind ourselves what some of Tocqueville’s insights were. Once we do, we can consider the Obama administration’s current nationalization of K-12 public-school curriculum, with Tocqueville’s insights in mind.
One of Tocqueville’s major insights was that Americans have benefited from popular participation in the large number of churches, charities, clubs, and voluntary associations in our country, as well as in state and local governments, which stand between the individual and the national government in Washington, D.C.
In essence, Tocqueville believed that the civic health of America depended on popular participation in entities like associations to create and maintain religious, private, or charter schools, as well as in local authorities like school districts with fully-empowered schools boards.
Such activity fosters civic virtue and “habits of the heart” and encourages everyday citizens to take on necessary social tasks that in pre-modern society lowly subjects were not allowed to undertake, but were instead the duty of the aristocracy.
When Tocqueville describes nineteenth-century American society he spoke, for example, of township school committees that were deeply rooted in their local communities. In those days, state control of local public education took the form of an annual report sent by the township committee to the state capital. There was no national control.
