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

Durkheimian theory posits a thin line between civil religion and public education. 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 of mythic struggle within U.S. society.