The Review of Education

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Social Tolerance and Education

W. Paul Vogt

To cite this article: W. Paul Vogt (1983) Social Tolerance and Education, The Review of
Education, 9:1, 41-52, DOI: 10.1080/0098559830090109

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Published online: 09 Jul 2006.

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Social Tolerance and Education
W. PAUL VOGT
Robert C. Serow. Schooling for Social
Diversity: An Analysis of Policy and Prac-
tice. New York: Teachers College Press,
1983. xii + 161 pp. $14.95 paper.
Janet Ward Schofield, Black and White in
School: Trust, Tension, or Tolerance ? New
York: Praeger, 1982. xvi + 255 pp. $29.95
cloth.
Highly educated people are more tolerant.
Nearly all evidence we have confirms this
fact. Conversely, the less formal education
a person has the more likely he or she is to
oppose school integration, to want to re-
strict the civil liberties of political non-
conformists, to advocate legislation against
homosexuals, to try to keep atheists from
teaching in schools, and so on. While we are
sure of this link between high levels of
education and a tendency to social toler-
ance—and between low levels of education
and intolerance—we are less certain why the
connection exists. What aspects of the edu-
cational experience lead people to be more
tolerant? How does schooling make indi-
viduals open to social diversity?
Presumably, if we could answer these
questions, we would better know how to use
educational policy in the service of the
social goal of increasing intergroup and
interpersonal tolerance. The two excellent
books under review move us closer to hav-
ing reliable answers to these questions and
to understanding which aspects of the re-
lationship between tolerance and education
remain unclear and need more research.
Serow's Schooling for Social Diversity is
a thoughtful interdisciplinary survey of the
most important theories and research find-
ings about tolerance and education. Scho-
field's Black and White in School applies
some of these theories and findings in an
impressively intensive ethnographic study
of one desegregated middle school. Serow
views tolerance and schooling through a
 42
wide-angle lens, Schofield through a micro-
scope. Taken together, these two studies
greatly improve our understanding of the
breadth and depth of the problems involved.
Before analyzing these works, it is well
first to define our subject of inquiry, since
tolerance is a remarkably slippery and
often misunderstood concept.
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Being tolerant involves putting up with
beliefs or behaviors or characteristics that
you disapprove of or dislike when you are
not compelled to do so, when, that is, you
potentially have the power to be intolerant.
That last qualification is important. If, for
example, you would like to persecute some-
one but are afraid of the legal consequences,
your forbearance will hardly count as tol-
erance. Should this definition sound rather
unpleasant, especially as a description of a
moral virtue, which most people would a-
gree tolerance is, that is because tolerance,
like many norms regulating social conduct,
is profoundly negative. Tolerance is sharp-
ly distinct from the positive encouragement
of human diversity, since, if you like some-
thing enough to encourage it, saying you
ought to tolerate it is a contradiction in
terms. Tolerance is more negative even
than indifference, for, if you do not care
about something, you will have no occasion
to tolerate it.
Putin other terms, on a scale of attitudes
and behaviors ranging from absolute hatred
and persecution at one end, through indif-
ference in the middle, to total love and
devotion at the other end, tolerance would
have to be located on the negative side of
the scale. Not far on the negative side, it is
true, but unquestionably more negative
than positive. Tolerance is essentially a
form of self-restraint. It is a negative virtue.
If that is so, why is tolerance thought of
as a good thing? Couldn't one go beyond
tolerance to welcome socio-cultural diver-
sity and positively value group and indi-
The Review of Education / Winter 1983
vidual differences? Of course one could —but
only to a certain extent. As long as people
differ from one another, and as long as
people have convictions, they will some-
times disapprove of one another. When
persons dislike or disapprove of others, as
they inevitably must (unless people were all
alike and/or had no strong beliefs about
anything), tolerance is one of the options
open to them. And, unless most people most
often pick the option of tolerance, social
peace will be impossible. Thus, tolerance
will always be indispensable in a complex
and changing society, since, in such a
society, people will always differ from one
another.
Of course, certain things probably ought
never be tolerated, at least in a tolerant
society. One of the paradoxes of a tolerant
social policy is that it entails being in-
tolerant of, and suppressing, certain ac-
tions incompatible with the values of a
tolerant society, such as intimidation by
the Ku Klux Klan or discriminatory hiring
practices—even if these behaviors are based
on the genuine convictions (which must be
tolerated) of the individuals engaged in
them. Thus, tolerance is not only a negative
virtue, it is a paradoxical one as well. A
parallel with individualism may help make
this clear.
Tolerance is closely allied with indivi-
dualism and shares similarly paradoxical
qualities. Individualism is best described as
a social belief which stresses the autonomy
of individual persons in the face of social
forces and beliefs. Yet individualism leads
to policies and legal principles that socially
compel persons to be individually respon-
sible for their acts and forces them to adopt
certain modes of conduct toward other
individuals. In the same way, in a society
governed by the principles of tolerance,
individuals, are constrained to conform to
rules of conduct, but these rules prohibit
 VOGT / Social Tolerance and Education
constraining other individuals to conform.
In short, individualism and tolerance are
values meant to bind persons together in
society, but they do so by allowing persons
comparative freedom from other social
bonds. Individualism and tolerance are
fully compatible with—and may even be
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functionally necessary to—maintaining har-
mony in a society characterized by com-
plexity and diveristy.
One final feature of tolerance that often
plagues those who study it needs to be
mentioned at this point. The concept of
tolerance can be applied to the full range of
human thought and action. In the realm of
thought, tolerance can describe vague atti-
tudes (e.g., "Oh, I don't know; live and let
live, I guess") or more explicit beliefs (e.g.,
all persons have an inalienable right to
practice the religion of their choice) or
formal theories (e.g., the classic works of
Lock, Voltaire, and Mill). In the realm of
action, tolerance can describe behaviors
(e.g., welcoming your new neighbors even
though you wish they were of different race)
or policies (e.g., rules for non-discrimina-
tory hiring) or legal principles (e.g., those
contained in the First and Fourteenth
Amendments to the U.S. Constitution).
Students of tolerance have frequently
been bedeviled by a failure to distinguish
clearly enough among these various kinds
of tolerance and to remember that tolerance
or the lack of it in one realm does not
necessarily tell us anything about whether
it exists in another. For example, John
Boswell, in a widely acclaimed and justly
respected 1study of tolerance toward homo-
sexuality, sometimes takes the absence of
intolerant policies in certain eras to be
evidence of the presence of tolerant atti-
tudes. But, the absence of intolerant poli-
cies could just as easily be a sign of positive
beliefs or of attitudes of indifference or of a
lack of will and/or resources for putting
43
intolerant policies into effect. In any case,
one of the merits of the books by Serow and
Schofield is that these authors usually re-
member the need to make many of the
distinctions listed above, particularly the
distinction between attitudes and behaviors.
An individual's attitudes and behaviors, it
appears, are as likely to conflict with one
another fully as often as they are to be in
harmony.
Having offered these preliminary re-
marks and definitions, we can return to an
expanded version of our original questions
about the relationship of education and
tolerance. Why is it that groups with high
levels of education almost invariably ex-
press higher levels of social tolerance than
those with lesser amounts of formal school-
ing? What in education accounts for the
fact that people who have experienced a
good deal of it are more willing to excercise
the kind of self-restraint implied in the
concept of tolerance and, thus, to put up
with beliefs, practices, and characteristics
of others that they do not like? Finally, is
the link between education and tolerance
more important for attitudes and beliefs or
for behaviors and policies?
Perhaps the best known answers to at
least some of these questions were put forth2
in a book by Clyde Nunn and others,
which, in turn, reinforced conclusions
reached by Samuel Stoffer in a famous
earlier study that has become something of
a model for sociological research on toler-
ance.3 These two studies were based on
elaborate attitude surveys done in the mid-
1950s and mid-1970s. A representative
sample of Americans was asked about its
political tolerance, about what the authors
sometimes call "democratic restraint." Re-
spondents were asked questions such as
whether they favored tapping the telephones
of suspected political subversives, whether
they would oppose anti-war demonstrations,
 44
whether they would want to allow an ad-
mitted or suspected communist to speak in
their community or to keep a college teach-
ing job. On the basis of the answers to these
questions, Nunn and his fellow authors
constructed a general "Tolerance Scale"
and correlated scores on it with other
characteristics of the respondants, includ-
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ing sex, age, place of residence, religion,
occupational status, and education.
Education was an important factor ex-
plaining scores on the Tolerance Scale;
indeed, it was the single most important
factor. Several other studies have come up
with similar findings. When comparing
groups in a particular society or when
comparing different societies,4 researchers
have routinely found education to be a-
mong the most important causes of varia-
tion in political and social tolerance.
Two qualifications must be introduced at
this point, however. First, there are always
individual exceptions to this general rule.
(This should come as no surprise, since,
after all, generalizations are only generally
true, which is why we call them generali-
zations.) What matters is the strength of a
particular generalization, and this one is
very strong. Second, like all scientific gen-
eralizations, this one is true only if all other
things are equal or held constant. Even if
education is one of the most significant
causes of tolerance levels, it is but one of
many. For example, tolerance is usually
rarer when a society is at war, is threatened
by war, or is experiencing economic hard
times. Tolerance is more common in eras of
peace and prosperity. Perceived danger of
almost any sort usually makes people, in-
cluding highly educated people, less tol-
erant. Yet, those with lower levels of edu-
cation are most likely to feel threatened by
more things than those with higher. In
short, "although it is probably true that
levels of political tolerance will be higher,
The Review of Education / Winter 1983
other things equal, when average levels of
education among the population increase,
increments in educational level alone do
not automatically bring about greater polit-
ical tolerance" (Nunn, et. al., p. 66). For
example, Germany in the 1930s had higher
levels of education than ever before and
higher levels of education than most other
societies, but one would hardly wish to
characterize the nation that voted Hitler
into power and enthusiastically supported
his policies as being noted for its tolerance.
Despite such important qualifications,
however, it remains true that people who
are otherwise similar, if they have different
levels of education, will have correspond-
ingly different levels of tolerance. Why?
Nunn and his co-authors provide a remark-
ably simple answer, and one that ought to
encourage educators everywhere. School-
ing has this effect "because the more edu-
cated are more cognitively able and more
culturally sophisticated" (p. 65).
In more detail, the argument is as fol-
lows. First, the more schooling you have,
the more likely you are to know about the
democratic process (assuming, of course,
that this is taught in school) and to know
that in order to work democracy requires
tolerance of diversity. Second, the more
schooling you have, the more likely you are
to know about different cultures and human
variety and the less likely you are to be
freightened by such variety. Third, the
more schooling you have, the more likely
your "cognitive development will be char-
acterized by... flexible, rational strategies
of thinking" (p. 61) that makes it possible
for you to imagine that you could be wrong
once in a while, and, consequently, that
enables you to realize that it might be good
to have people around who disagree with
you. In some respects this is an old, classic
idea. As John Stuart Mill declared in 1859,
since "we can never be sure that the opinion
 VOGT / Social Tolerance and Education
we are endeavoring to stiffle is a false
opinion," we shouldn't stiffle any. The be-
liefs we can be most certain of are those
based on "a standing invitation to the
whole world to prove them unfounded." In
short, someone "who knows only his own
side of the case knows little of that."5 Thus
educated persons who seek the truth will
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realize that having opponents, though
quite annoying, is positively valuable. This
pedagogical principle is virtually as old as
higher education itself. As Robert de Sorbon
put it seven centuries ago, "nothing is
perfectly known until it has been masti-
cated in the jaws of debate."6
In short, for Nunn et. al, education
makes people more tolerant because it
makes them more rational. Any curricular
contents or processes that heighten ration-
ality will foster intellectual and, therefore,
social tolerance. The most formal academic
subjects, if they teach the principles of good
thinking, could easily have important social
consequences, more important perhaps
than courses explicitly intended to do so.
Robert C. Serow in Schooling for Social
Diversity and Janet Ward Schofield in
Black and White in School call this whole
line of reasoning into question. Since Serow
does so more explicitly, we'will consider his
objections first. That, in turn, will ready us
for the alternate explanations of the impact
of education on tolerance offered by the two
books under review.
According to Serow, a very important
shortcoming of most sociological studies of
tolerance (including the one by Nunn et. al
that we have just examined) is that they are
based on standardized attitude surveys.
These, he believes, might not actually tell
us much about people's attitudes. The
strong correlation between high levels of
education and high tolerance scores on
attitude surveys has another explanation:
people with a great deal of formal schooling
45
are good at taking tests, at giving the
"right" answers. In the case of attitude
surveys about tolerance, the right answers
are the socially approved, tolerant answers.
Thus, highly educated individuals with
well-developed test-taking skills will get
higher tolerance scores whether or not they
are in fact more tolerant.
But, even if the surveys were not flawed
in this way and revealed the real attitudes
of respondents, Serow says that "research
indicates that a person's attitudes often
have little bearing on behavior" (p. 40).
Schofield makes the same point concluding
that "changing the interracial behavior of
students may be a more realistic and readi-
ly obtainable goal for desegregated schools"
(p. 217) than changing their attitudes. In
any case, it is quite clear that for both of our
authors, it is very significant that people
can believe one thing and do another.
Serow does not deny that tolerance in-
creases with schooling. He too thinks that
the correlation between levels of tolerance
and levels of education is quite strong and
measures a real relationship, but he be-
lieves that the cause behind the correlation
has very little to do with curricular content—
or, seemingly, with anything else: 'Very
few, if any, specific policies, programs, or
practices have been found to be consis-
tently and significantly associated with
students' attitudes toward social or polit-
ical diversity" (p. 23). Thus, toleration ap-
parently is "a function more of the amount
of schooling that individuals receive than
of the ways in which they are educated" (p.
37).
This conclusion, if accurate, is distress-
ing should we wish to use educational pol-
icy to increase tolerance, since, apart from
raising the general education level of the
population, we have no good idea about
how to do so. For example, educators work-
ing in a recently desegrated high school,
 46
who need to do something immediately to
insure racial tolerance, can do very little
about the general educational level of the
population. They can only institute specific
local policies, but none of these has been
shown to make any difference. In short, as
Serow concludes, "that American educa-
tion appears to be reasonably successful in
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fostering tolerance for diversity is reassur-
ing. That it does so by means unknown and
unexplained is not" (p. 36).
Despite the many studies Serow cites
indicating that curricular contents have
little measurable effect on tolerance, there
may still be something to the "cultural
sophistication" argument offered by Nunn
and others. Most of those who have con-
cluded that education has an impact on
values have stressed that higher education
is more likely to do so than either primary or
secondary schooling. For example, college
students are more likely than high school
students to express a political party alle-
giance different from that of their parents,
and students well along in their college
careers more often do so than beginning
college students. Similarly, high school
students with strong academic records are
more likely to be politically conservative,
whereas college students with good grades—
and who presumably, therefore, identify
with the values of higher education—are
more likely to be liberal.7
This evidence about the greater impact of
higher education still does not resolve the
question of whether the curriculum is pri-
marily responsible for the effects of higher
education on social and political values.
The differences between those with higher
educations and those without could just as
easily be due to the life style characteristics
of college students, such as living away
from home and interacting with students
from diverse backgrounds. (If this is true,
we could predict that the influence of com-
The Review of Education / Winter 1983
munity colleges on values would be much
less great than that of four-year, residential
colleges.)
In any case, if higher education is the
crucial experience in promoting tolerance,
many of the studies cited by Serow that
indicate that specific characteristics of
schooling cannot be shown to increase toler-
ance for diversity may be irrelevant, since
most of those studies have tried to measure
the effects of differences in primary and
secondary schools. Yet Serow is surely right
that it will be of little consolation to edu-
cators in a racially troubled high school to
learn that their students, should they happen
to go to college, will become more tolerant
after they leave. The question remains, is
there anything primary- and secondary-
school educators can do to increase toler-
ance in and thereby insure the smooth
functioning of their schools? Serow does in
fact offer some grounds for hope and a way
around the "two apparently contradictory
findings—the strong effects of education in
general and the weak effects of specific
school experiences" (p. 38). He contends
that there are, after all, some experiences
that promote tolerance, that these can be
identified, and that this has important pol-
icy implications for teachers and school
administrators.
According to Serow, the whole problem
of the relationship between tolerance and
schooling needs to be reconceptualized, and
this is true whether our concerns are mostly
with research and understanding or with
policies and practices. Serow argues that
previous research—by focusing on attitudes
rather than behaviors, by studying what
students say as opposed to what they do—
has underestimated "the influence of spe-
cific school experiences" (p. 42). What we
need to look at, he contends, is whether
students from different backgrounds can
get along in school well enough that the
 VOGT / Social Tolerance and Education
school can function and the students can
learn. While feelings of brotherhood, love of
human diversity, and the like would be nice,
"they are not essential to the success of a
desegregation program" (p. 70). Students
do not need to love one another; they need
merely to be able to coexist, to tolerate one
another.
The kind of relationship Serow has in
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mind is what he calls "functional toler-
ance" where people who do not necessarily
like one another can nonetheless manage to
get on together and have "the willingness
and ability to work with members of diverse
groups in pursuit of individual and com-
mon goals" (p. 46). Schools can, and often
do, influence students to become function-
ally tolerant. Specific characteristics of
schools while they may be unintentional
by-products of schooling, account for this
tendency to functional tolerance. Put simp-
ly, if schools just "do their own thing" and
are also desegregated, increased tolerance
will be a natural result. Basing his argu-
ment on the 8classic studies of Durkheim
and Dreeben, Serow offers an explanation
of how tolerance can sometimes be in-
creased "not as a result of deliberate poli-
cies, but instead as a consequence of routine
instructional practices and interactions be-
tween teachers and students and between
students and students" (p. 77).
School is generally the child's first intro-
duction to the broader life of the society.
When children go to school, they leave their
families and move into a more impersonal
world where they must associate with
people they probably have never met before
and who may be significantly different
from themselves. Suddenly, the child is no
longer only "son" or "daughter" but takes
on the different role of "student," and is
expected to act accordingly. While there is
47
no reason to believe that schools and
teachers are unbiased and always apply
impersonal standards, there is every reason
to believe that they usually do so more than
the neighborhoods and families from which
the students come. Schools have a tendency
to apply "universalistic" standards of com-
petence—more so, at any rate, than do fami-
lies and ethnically and racially homogen-
eous neighborhoods. The student is thus
confronted with a situation where, abruptly,
it no longer matters if you are black or
Italian or Mommy's favorite. Now what
counts is whether you did your homework
and whether you did it well. If such uni-
versalistic standards are applied in a hetero-
geneous, desegregated context, Serow ar-
gues, the natural result will be functional
tolerance. Students learn that they will be
judged more on their achievement than on
their characteristics, more on their behavior
than on their background, and that they
will be punished if they disrupt the school
by being unable to get along with people
who are not their friends.
There have been objections to this ap-
proach. Mostly, they have been based on
the fact that some of the policies directed
toward bringing about functional tolerance
through applying universalistic standards
in desegregated schools are themselves not
universalistic.9 Thus, busing for the pur-
pose of school desegregation can hardly be
thought of as a "colorblind" policy and may
subvert the very universalism it is meant to
promote. Some social critics have wondered
"whether the benefits of desegregation are
worth the price of legitimizing race as a
criterion for student enrollment." Serow
contends that the advantages outweigh the
costs, since, "the availability of sustained
daily contact between children of varying
backgrounds is a prerequisite for the de-
velopment of the cooperative, tolerant
 48
behavior that is essential to the well-being
of a diverse democratic society" (p. 57).
Desegregation does not always produce
tolerance, of course, but it does work more
often than news reports about cities like
Boston might cause us to expect. In what
contexts does desegregation "take" and
lead to harmony rather than conflict?
Since, clearly, in some cases, "sustained
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daily contact between children of varying
backgrounds" leads to open warfare be-
tween them, when and how does it more
often cause them to become functionally
tolerant? To answer these questions, it is
helpful to turn to Schofield's intensive
analysis of the process of desegregation in
one school.
"Wexler Middle School"—a fictional
name for a real school in a "large, indus-
trial, northeastern city" that the author
calls "Waterford"—opened in 1975. Unen-
thusiastic in responding to federal and
state desegregation mandates such as bus-
ing and redistricting, Waterford adopted a
piecemeal approach. Wexler represented
the city's most serious effort to resolve its
segregation problems without resorting to
an overall plan. Wexler was to be a "magnet
school." The School Board hoped that
Wexler's excellent physical facilities com-
bined with its attempt to achieve the goal of
academic excellence would draw students
to the new desegregated school. One of
Wexler's greatest advantages in making
this attempt was that it was a new school
located not within, but in a sort of neutral
zone between, racially and ethnically segre-
gated neighborhoods. Thus, Wexler was
able to avoid some of the worst sorts of
territoriality, i.e., resistance to "them" forc-
ing their way into "our" school.
Janet Schofield and her team of re-
searchers spent hundreds of hours over a
period of three years observing classes,
attending faculty meetings, watching stu-
The Review of Education / Winter 1983
dents at play, noting seating arrangements
in the cafeteria, and in interviewing stu-
dents, teachers, and administrators. The
main focus of study was the "development
of social relations among Wexler's students"
(p. 39). Schofield was consciously testing
theories of social psychology that Serow
used to explain the growth of functional
tolerance. The work that most importantly
shaped Schofield's thinking, and less di-
rectly Serow's, was Gordon Allport's The
Nature of Prejudice, first published in 1954.
One of Allport's main concerns in that work
was specifying the conditions that would
lead to improved intergroup relations. His
answer has come to be known as "contact
theory." Contact between members of for-
merly hostile groups will tend to reduce
antagonism between them—but not just
any sort of contact will have this effect.
Since, under some conditions, contact
has increased conflict, it is clear that the
contact must occur in a particular sort of
context if it is to have the desired conse-
quences. Drawing on Allport and subse-
quent researchers, Schofield specified that
context under three general headings (pp.
9-29). First, the members of the two groups
must have equal status within the contact
situation. In schools, this means that the
two groups are equally represented in
various desirable roles and activities such
as teacher, administrator, class officer, club
president, student in the accelerated aca-
demic track, and so on. Second, the power-
ful members of the community and the
authorities in the contact situation have to
advocate, strongly and publicly, increased
harmony between the groups coming into
contact. Third, the contact must take place
in a cooperative, or at least non-competi-
tive, atmosphere. Competition between in-
dividuals is likely to exacerbate prejudice
between groups, as, for example, when un-
employed white males competing for scarce
 VOGT / Social Tolerance and Education
jobs blame their difficulties in finding em-
ployment on the few blacks and women
who have benefitted from affirmative ac-
tion hiring programs rather than on the
general state of the economy, which, of
course, is the main source of joblessness. (It
is much easier for the simple-minded to
focus on race, sex, or ethnicity than, say, on
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an inadequate rate of capital investment.)
In schools, a non-competitive atmosphere
would necessitate teaching techniques such
as cooperative, integrated study groups in
which students work together for common
goals.
Put negatively, it does little good to have
students of different backgrounds in the
same school building if they do not have
equal access to positions of high status
within the school, if students of different
backgrounds are not in the same class-
rooms or if they never sit together when
they are, if they never work together, and if
teachers, administrators, and school board
members resent and vocally resist the de-
segregation effort.
What the experience of Wexler shows is
how hard it is to meet these conditions for a
positive contact situation—even with good
intentions, serious effort, and no overt re-
sistance. The advantage of an on-site case
study like Schofield's is that it enable us to
see how theories and policies can actually
be put into practice and gives us a fuller
conception of the barriers to doing so. A
brief account of some of the problems that
arose at Wexler is highly instructive about
the kinds of difficulties that will be en-
countered when we attempt to use schools
to foster integration or functional tolerance.
Teachers at Wexler thought of themselves
as responsible mostly for the academic
content of their courses and resisted any-
thing they saw as impeding academic pro-
gress. Teachers avoided "nontraditional
classroom procedures such as cooperative
49
work groups... because they were perceived
as undermining academic progress for the
sake of social goals" (p. 41). Despite the fact
that there is no firm evidence that coopera-
tive work groups are academically less effec-
tive than individual competition, one will
generally find it hard to get teachers to use
them. Teachers are more often than not
very methodologically conservative and
generally have little knowledge of research
findings on10the effectiveness of teaching
techniques. This conservatism and ignor-
ance will always inhibit reforms, whether
curricular or social, that require new
methods.
Parents and students as well as teachers
also opposed any procedures that seemed to
put the goal of integration ahead of or even
appeared to make it equal to imparting the
formal curriculum. Thus, despite a great
deal of worry these days that the social role
of schooling is obliterating its educational
function,11 there is considerable evidence
that quite the opposite is true. As Serow
puts it, "cognitive matters typically have
priority over affective outcomes, if not in a
school district's formal goal statements,
then at least in its day to day operations" (p.
25).
Teachers at Wexler, and presumably in
many other schools, usually go about the
business of imparting the formal curricu-
lum in a color-blind, universalistic manner
and assume that, if they do so, integration
will more or less take care of itself. This is
what Schofield (and Serow borrowing from
Schofield) calls the "natural progression
assumption," that is, the belief shared by
most teachers that "mere contact, in and of
itself, would bring about improved inter-
group relations," and thus that they need
make no effort to structure the "contact in a
way designed to promote positive relations"
(pp. 46-47). Indeed, at Wexler, there was a
virtual taboo about even referring to race as
 50
possibly being significant. Students and
faculty (although not administrators) op-
erated in a "pretense awareness context"
(p. 67). All individuals knew that they were
different from some others in the school,
they knew that all other individuals knew,
but they all acted as though they were
unaware of such differences, or more pre-
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cisely, they said they acted as though they
were unaware of the differences.
Color-blind, universalistic policies, as
implemented at Wexler, actually tended to
undermine the conditions necessary for con-
tact to result in integration, or even in an
optimal amount of functional tolerance.
Putting students into fast and slow classes
or into achievement groups within hetero-
geneously grouped classes, although it was
done solely on cognitive, color-blind criteria,
often led to "resegregation by achievement
level" (p. 77). Grouping students according
to academic ability or achievement leads to
de facto segregation by social class, which,
in turn, usually means de facto racial seg-
regation. And, "students tended to see race,
rather than social class, as the causal var-
iable" (p. 109) in such resegregation. One
white student put in very striking terms:
"Interviewer: Do you think that being in a school
like Wexler has changed white kids' ideas about
blacks?
Mary: It changed mine. It made me prejudiced
really... You know, it is just so obvious that whites
are smarter than blacks. My mother keeps telling
me it's socioeconomic background ..." (p. 93).
Thus, academic tracking and the conse-
quent de facto socialclass segregation—which
is de facto racial segregation—cannot but
reinforce sterotyping and make tolerance,
to say nothing of integration, very difficult
to achieve. Tracking's pedagogical advan-
tages are minimal at best. With the possible
exceptions of real geniuses and the severely
mentally retarded (and there will always be
very few of these), there is no reliable,
The Review of Education / Winter 1983
unambiguous evidence that tracking im-
proves student learning. Why, then, does it
persist? Perhaps because it makes some
teachers' jobs easier, gives an ego boost to
some parents living vicariously through
their children, and gratifies the general
urge to make individuals distinctions.
Even without tracking, teaching methods
stressing individual competition within
classes that are mixed in terms of ability
and achievement can have the same dele-
terious consequences for intergroup rela-
tions. If students perceive, as they inevit-
ably will, that blacks often do not do as well
in such competitions as whites, and if stu-
dents do not perceive, as they inevitable
will not, that the difference is one of social
class rather than race, racial sterotyping
will be the predictable result.
There is, however, a fairly obvious way to
get around these problems. Teachers could
pursue their color-blind, universalistic, cog-
nitive goals without vitiating the value of
interracial contact—if certain sorts of admin-
istrative steps are taken. First, the student
body, faculty and administrative staff
would have to be desegregated. (This cri-
terion was met at Wexler.) Then, to avoid
resegregation, certain procedures would
have to be enforced, rigorously from above.
Students would have to be assigned to
classes randomly, seating within classes
would also have to racially random (say, by
alphabetical order), and teachers would
have to be seriously evaluated on their
ability to use non-traditional, cooperative
teaching methods, If such policies were
mandated from a high administrative level
and were consistently enforced, there is
reason to believe that they would encounter
little resistance. As Allport put it in the
foreward to the second edition of his classic
work, most people will "accept a forthright12
fait accompli with little protest or disorder."
If such policies were adopted, then the
 VOGT / Social Tolerance and Education
"natural progression assumption" could be
valid. Without such pressure from elites,
however, "natural regression" to racist and
classist norms may be unfortunately com-
mon.
How likely is it that such policies will be
adopted and strenuously enforced? As
Serow's concluding chapter on "Education
and Tolerance in the 1980s" indicates, the
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prospects are not bright, and they have, if
anything, become dimmer in the few months
since his book was published. While edu-
cation is much in the public eye, and may
even be an important issue in the 1984
presidential campaign, all evidence indi-
cates that improving intergroup relations is
by no means at the top of anyone's agenda
for education. In an almost eerie reenact-
ment of the national anxiety over education
that followed the launching of the Soviet
sputnik in the late 1950s, the American
public has become obsessed with increas-
ing the academic quality of education.13 Of
course, today, the source of the anxiety has
changed from Russian satelites to Japa-
nese semiconductors, but the consequences
are much the same.
Prestigious groups—such as the Presi-
dent's National Commission on Excellence
in Education and the Task Force on Edu-
cation for Economic Growth of the National
Governor's Association—sound the alarm
every few weeks and seem to find a re-
sponsive audience, at least in the national
media. I would not want to argue that
educational excellence is a bad thing. In-
deed, I firmly believe that excellence is . . .
well, excellent. Nonetheless, for those who
value social justice as well as intellectual
achievement, the portents are far from
encouraging.
Toleration, harmony, and social equity
are by no means incompatible with increas-
ing students' levels of academic perform-
ance. In the long run, the goal of a rigor-
51
ously "elite" education in the "basics" for
all students may help promote the social
values of justice and toelrance. But, com-
bining these social goals with the social
goal of striving for improved academic
standards will require careful attention to
the way the school day is structured so that
in achieving one end we do not sacrifice the
other.
Despite the problems at Wexler discussed
above, on the whole, the school was a
qualified success. While, "at the end of six
years, it was a far cry from the model of
integrated education it had set out to be" (p.
210-211), the school experienced few overt
racial problems. Students did seem to im-
prove their attitudes and, more signifi-
cantly, their behaviors toward one another.
The changes were far from astonishing, but
they were real, and they appear to have
been made without any sacrifice of aca-
demic excellence. In the immediate future,
however, given the declining national com-
mitment to using education for certain sorts
of social goals, we can expect fewer modest
experiments like Wexler. Equally likely is
an increase in social and racial segregation
disguised as or justified by the need for
educational excellence.
When resources are limited—and resources
are always limited—we have to rank our
goals. Today, we seem to have a choice, on
the one hand, between the social goal of
improved race relations and, on the other,
the equally social goal of competing more
effectively with the Japanese by raising
educational standards. While the two ends
are not necessarily incompatible, there are
many indications that policy makers tend
to see them as mutually exclusive. Thus, for
those who think that the strength of a
society depends as much on its internal
harmony as on its ability to compete
economically with foreign rivals, the future
of American education must appear gloomy.
 52 The Review of Education / Winter 1983

NOTES
1. JohnBoswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and
Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe
from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the
Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980).
2. Clyde Z. Nunn, Harry J. Crockett Jr., and J. Allen
Williams, Jr., Tolerance for Nonconformity: A
National Survey of Americans' Changing Com-
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 06:16 23 June 2016

mitment to Civil Liberties (San Francisco: Jossey-

Bass, 1978).
3. Samuel A. Stouffer. Communism, Conformity,
and Civil Liberties: A Cross-Section of the Nation
Speaks Its Mind [Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1955).
4. For international comparisons see Seymour
Martin Iipset, "Some Social Requisites of Demo-
cracy^' American Political Science Review, vol. 53
(1959), pp. 69-105.
5. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Co., 1978 [original edition,
1859]), pp. 16, 20, 35.
6. Quoted in Emile Durkheim, L'Evolution peda-
gogique en France (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1969 [original edition, 1938]), p. 165.
7. For evidence on the distinctive importance of
higher education see Seymour Martin Iipset, Re-
bellion in the University (Boston: Little, Brown, &
Co., 1971) and Herbert Hyman and Charles Wright,
Education's Lasting Influence on Values (Chigaco:
University of Chicago Press, 1979).
8. Emile Durkheim, Moral Education: A Study in
the Theory and Application of the Sociology of
Education (New York: Free Press, 1961 [original
edition, 1925]). Robert Dreeben, On What Is Learned
in School (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1968).
9. Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination
(New York: Basic Books, 198).
10. On the methodological conservatism of teachers
see Dan R. Lortie, Schoolteacher: A Sociological
Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
11. For a spirited argument that socialization is
obliterating education see David Nyberg and Kieran
Egan, The Erosion of Education: Socialization and
the Schools (New York: Teachers College Press,
1981).
12. Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), p. v.
13. See the results of the survey "The Politics of
Education: What the Public Thinks" reported in
Newsweek for June 27, 1983, p. 61.