Much of the disagreement caused by the use of the term paternalism in David Whitman's new book stems, I think, from a reticence to acknowledge reality. That's unfortunate--education policy already suffers from a dearth of invested persons willing to call things what they are.
Take, for instance, the reluctance of Eric Adler, who co-founded the SEED School, to have paternalism in any way attached to his institution. Whitman writes:
Eric Adler, cofounder of the SEED School in Washington, D.C., argues that calling a school paternalistic implies that its staff is asserting that it "knows better than others--like parents or the neighborhood"--which values schools should transmit. "I don't think SEED asserts that we ???know better,' we just assert that we have more resources with which to teach."
I get it. Adler has no reason to ascent to the labeling of his school as paternalistic and every reason to rebut it. But his statement is untrue. SEED (where students are held to rigid standards of discipline and conduct, and where they live for five days a week) is inarguably asserting, albeit implicitly, that it "knows better." SEED is not set up to complement the values of its students' neighborhoods; it was constructed precisely to remove students from those neighborhoods and inculcate in the youngsters a wholly different set of values than they'd find at home. Adler's rejoinder about "resources" is at best tangential to the whole enterprise.
Adler has done some marvelous things, of course, for which he deserves much praise. One wishes, though, that he were a bit more honest about why he designed SEED the way he did.
Which brings up another point that Whitman may or may not make in his book (I haven't yet finished it): These paternalistic schools are generally founded and run by liberals for whom the admission that certain values work and others just don't can be difficult. And so they don't make such admissions. But they need not--their schools do the talking for them.