A Reviewer’s Notebook – 1960/2

Ten years ago if an editor had the temerity to publish an article attacking “progressive” education, he could count on a torrent of mail denouncing him as a fascist. To­day, though the “progressives” still dominate the teaching hier­archy in the public schools, the standards of controversy are at least a little more gentlemanly. One can now make the argument for “basic education”—as eight­een authors and scholars have made it in The Case for Basic Education, edited by James D. Koerner (Little, Brown, 256 pp., $4.00)—without running the risk of total ostracism.

So much, then, has been gained for the right to argue—which is what “free speech” is about any­way. Since argument may now proceed without too much inter­ruption from those who consider vituperation the crowning glory of literacy, we are very probably at the beginning of a new period in education. The “old” will hardly be restored as it existed forty or more years ago. But there will be synthesis of the old and the new, and “experiments” will cease to run one way only.

To some extent, at least, the new synthesis will undoubtedly restore the old “tool” courses of the past to their ancient high estate. But what do we mean by “tools”? Wasn’t the “instrumental” philos­ophy of John Dewey, which has dominated the public schools for several generations, the very thing needed to give the student the means of getting along in his world? Isn’t “vocationalism” the proper educational “instrument”—or “tool”—for preparing the stu­dent to adjust himself to the de­mands of society?

No “Generating” Power

The answer provided by Mr. Koerner’s contributors is that vo­cational tools, as Clifton Fadiman puts it in the opening essay, have no “generating” power. A course in hotel keeping, or in driver-education, is “self-terminating.” A course in French, on the other hand, is a “generating” tool in that it will enable the serious student to unlock as many doors as may be found in books written by Frenchmen. In a secondary school that knows its business, the student will finish senior year—or the “twelfth grade”—with the ability to read, write, speak, cal­culate, and listen. He will go forth into the world possessing some of the elements of reasoning, and, as Mr. Fadiman so succinctly states, he will be “put on to the necessary business of drawing abstract con­clusions from particular in­stances.”

When Mr. Fadiman went to high school back in the period 1916-20, he had four years of English, four of German, three of French, three or four years of history, a no-nonsense factual course in civics, a year of physics, a year of biology, and three years of mathe­matics, through trigonometry. He didn’t learn about “dating,” he took no course in square-dancing, he had to discover the secrets of cookery for himself, and his in­struction on how to be a good hus­band began when he took unto himself a wife. Yet, strangely enough, his high school curricu­lum proved to be quite adequate to the “life-adjustment” which Mr. Fadiman had to make as an editor, writer, translator, and pub­lic speaker.

Mr. Fadiman mentions these “practical” advantages of his ed­ucation merely to explode them; the important thing, he says, is that his “basic” foundation gave him the wherewithal for the self-education that should be every man’s concern to the hour of his death. It even allowed him to un­lock the manual of instructions which he had to master in order to get a license to drive a car.

The “Social Studies”

After Mr. Fadiman’s opening essay, there come the more special­ized contributions. George C. S. Benson, President of Claremont Men’s College, thinks students should learn that the United States is not only a democracy but a federated republic. Ray Allen Billington of Northwestern Uni­versity and Carlton J. H. Hayes of Columbia lament that both American and European history have been denatured by being pre­sented as part of “social studies” courses that offer a vague mish­mash of geography, ecology, civics, economics, sociology, his­tory, and current events. Clyde F. Kohn of the State University of Iowa pleads for a straight treat­ment of geography as something that “deals consistently with the location and distribution of phe­nomena over the earth’s surface.” Donald R. Tuttle of Fenn College and Douglas Bush of Harvard speak for less preoccupation with radio techniques and business-letter writing and more concentra­tion on grammar, syntax, the “conscious art” of composition, and a few masterpieces such as the King James Bible, Milton, and Shakespeare.

Some of the “Basics”

The case for the classical and foreign languages is made by Gerald F. Else of the University of Michigan and Hunter Kellen­berger of Brown, who note that English-speaking students have much to gain from exposure to other cultures and to languages which have structural character­istics of their own that may or may not carry over into English. As for mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology, Stewart Scott Cairns, Sydney S. Greenfield, Joel H. Hildebrand, and M. H. Trytten argue convincingly that there are other necessary ways of “reading” the universe than those supplied by the “language arts.” The truly educated man must be able to express physical laws in mathematical formulas and to translate them back into ordinary English. And biology is certainly essential to a perspective on the humanities. Even the “electives”—art, music, philosophy, and speech—have their claims to a place in the “basic” secondary cur­riculum, as the essays of Oliver W. Larkin, Joseph Kerman, Douglas N. Morgan, and Bower Aly insist.

Herbert M. Schwab, who sums up “the prospects for Basic Educa­tion” in a final essay, speaks out of his experience as a member of the Portland, Oregon, school board. Out of his knowledge of the ways of the “educationist” hierarchy, he doubts that leader­ship in the “basic” movement will “come in sufficient force from the ranks of public educators.” It is the private citizen—the parent—who holds the key to the “restora­tion of learning.” And—though none of the contributors to Mr. Koerner’s symposium seems anx­ious to make the point—the com­petition of the private school is certainly needed to spark the re­vival.

Need for Economic Education

None of Mr. Koerner’s contri­butors thinks that economics should be made a “specialized” high school course, although Dr. Benson does say that the intelli­gent high school senior is “capable of learning about price control in the eighteenth century, tariffs in the nineteenth, and agricultural price support in the twentieth.” But even if the high school is not the place for economics as such, the bright college student with the “basics” behind him would not easily be duped by socialist propa­ganda.

“Life-adjustment” courses in the high schools are, on the other hand, a fecund spawning ground for collectivists. When John Dewey stressed “learning by do­ing,” he was acting as a tradi­tional American pragmatist. But Deweyan “experimentalism” has, over the past three decades, re­coiled upon itself. The typical modern Dewey “experimenter” seeks the approbation of his “group”; he “learns to do” in com­pany, as part of a team. “Group dynamics” is the word for it. By stressing the “social” aspects of “learning by doing,” the modern disciple of Dewey usually ends by endorsing the tyranny of the crowd. Thus what began as an ex­altation of individual experimental “action” ends, paradoxically, in killing the urge to do new things in unconventional ways. The “group” might not like it.

Mr. Koerner’s contributors have not dealt in controversial matters that bear on the conflict of social and economic philosophies. The Council for Basic Education, which sponsors this book, is, after all, a socially non-partisan body. But the American tradition was created by men who had had a “basic” education—and that tra­dition should benefit immeasurably from a recrudescence of an educational philosophy that stresses clarity in thinking above all.

Freedom And Federalism by Felix Morley. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company. Xii-274 pp. $5.00.)

Reviewed by Frederick A. Manchester

Mr. Morley means to use his terms with precision, and this pre­cision starts with his title. When he says “federalism,” he is refer­ring in no way to our misnamed federal government (we ought to call it the central or national gov­ernment), but to a structure by which a group of more or less in­dependent units can be brought to­gether in a single political system. This structure may differ in dif­ferent manifestations but is always characterized by a distri­bution of power between the cen­tral government and the partici­pating units, by a written consti­tution “subject to amendment by some prescribed process,” and by a supreme court “empowered to decide just where the division of sovereignty lies in any contested case, at any particular time.”

An “outstanding asset of the federal form of government” is its flexibility. “By the device of keep­ing certain governmental powers under strictly local control, people with great diversities may be encouraged to unite under one flag.” Examples of federations promoted by this flexibility are the Swiss Confederation, joining together German-speaking, French-speak­ing, and Italian-speaking cantons; Canada, unifying communities “distinctively English and French in their linguistic, religious and cultural backgrounds”; and the German Empire from 1871 to 1918, integrating separate mon­archies.

The concept of federalism con­tinues to live, is indeed taking on fresh life. A chapter is entitled “The Vitality of Federalism,” and in this many illustrations are given—including the German Federal Republic, the Federation of Ma­laya, the recently organized Fed­eration of the West Indies. The “resurgent vitality of federalism… is encouraging to all who look for something better than `cold war’ ad infinitum. For through the gradual formation of perhaps a dozen great federations, of which the United States and Russia [Russia not now in reality federal] would certainly be two, those polarized enemies would be disengaged, a balance of power would be re-established, the back­ward nations might look forward to some such blossoming as came to our own backward States when they federated, and above all a better basis of less recriminatory international cooperation might well be laid.”

I have followed through, sketch­ily, the second part of the title Freedom and Federalism. What relation does Mr. Morley find be­tween the two concepts named? Roughly, this might be summed up in terms of a direct proportion: the less federalism, the less free­dom. What Mr. Morley fears is un­due concentration of power, espe­cially perhaps when, as he thinks is now the case, Rousseau’s concept of a volonté générale, so recognized or not, is rife, and encourages the executive of a central government to identify with the “general will” his own ideas and predilections.

The title of the volume, and its purpose (to which I shall come later), warrant, I think, the promi­nence I have given the general idea of federalism; but what lingers in the mind as the core of the essay is the account of federalism in the United States: its original nature, involving an extension of “the doc­trine of the separation of powers a great deal farther than is required by the mere structure of federal­ism”; its great deterioration in the direction of an all-powerful central government; facts and forces which show its persistence in the national consciousness or counter its downward motion; and its present prospects.

What in all this most engages the attention is the series of steps—a sort of Rake’s Progress—by which the stanch federalism of George Washington and even Abraham Lincoln becomes the quasi national socialism of Frank­lin D. Roosevelt. Successive chapter titles hint the central story: “The Fourteenth Amendment,” “Com­merce and Nationalization,” “De­mocracy and Empire,” “Nationali­zation Through Foreign Policy,” “New Deal Democracy,” “The Serv­ice State.” Some readers may be especially struck, as I was, by the immense importance attaching to the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, which gave Congress “for the first time power to enforce, in all the States, rights as to which it had previously possessed no power to legislate.”

Prospects for American Federal System

What is to be the future of our American federal system? It hangs in the balance. “There is a prima facie case for thinking that… [it] will continue to serve for a future now unusually unpredictable…. At least equally possible is the al­ternative that federal theory will be discarded, even without war, by the voluntary actions of Ameri­cans themselves, in favor of that highly centralized, managerial form of government which to many now seems demanded by the com­plexities of modern civilization.”

As to what Mr. Morley himself desires, there is no doubt, objec­tive as he has tried to make his discussion; he is for federalism, and the freedom which it pro­motes. Indeed, his chief concern in this book (as I interpret him) is to voice a warning that as govern­ments the world over become more concentrated (a development he expects) liberty is endangered, and to suggest that the general adoption of federalism is its best protection.

The essay is a labor of patriotism—and, scarcely less, a labor of piety. The second aspect becomes evident in the last chapter, where good government is bound up with religious faith. A distinction is made between freedom and lib­erty. “Liberty has a religious as­sociation which freedom lacks.” “Liberty is depicted by these defi­nitions ['Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty'; the service of God is 'perfect freedom'] as earthly freedom perfected by faith in values not of this earth.” With all due respect to the high purpose of the author in making it, I confess this distinction ap­pears to me an impossible one to establish in the mind of the body politic, and therefore to be of little general value. Let us simplify, rather than unnecessarily compli­cate, our political vocabulary. The dictionary, says Mr. Morley, seems to sanction the interchangeable use of the two terms: I should be in­clined to maintain that when one is concerned with the meanings of words, and especially of words that are to have wide public signifi­cance, one does well, first of all, to make the incorruptible dictionary one’s ally.

I could pick a gentle quarrel with Mr. Morley on other counts too.

His idea—he may be bending over backwards a little—that con­stitutional interpretation “must take cognizance of changing cir­cumstance,” and, again, that “in this [the integration] case the Su­preme Court had to interpret wording of 1868 in the light of conditions in 1954,” appears to me radically and gravely in error. A federal constitution, including its amendments, should be applied in the sense it was meant to have by those who wrote and adopted it—so far as this may be ascertained; if changing circumstance renders a provision no longer acceptable, the only defensible remedy lies, not in imposing on this a new meaning, but in altering it by the method prescribed.

His idea that there is a causal relation between climatic and geo­physical conditions on the one hand, and political views and require­ments on the other, seems to me to be largely an illusion, and to hark back to certain naturalistic falla­cies which have been more charac­teristic of the eighteenth and nine­teenth centuries—in the Occident at least—than of the twentieth. I will quote one (to my mind) aston­ishing sentence. “Even identical twins,” says Mr. Morley, “will de­velop very different political out­looks if one lives in a well-watered area, the other on land which re­quires constant irrigation.”

His characterization of Frank­lin D. Roosevelt as “this great American President”—when one considers his candid account of the New Deal era—is hard to under­stand. A single item in this ac­count will go far to explain my dif­ficulty. The speech in which the Four Freedoms were announced, Mr. Morley declares, is “an excel­lent illustration of the subtle man­ner in which—with the aid of war psychology—this great American President waged his uphill fight.” He describes the Four Freedoms—and this description, let me say, admiringly, contains the first cor­rect assessment of the formula I have seen or heard—as an “in­harmonious quartette,” and a “monstrosity” produced by a “clever amalgamation of contra­dictory concepts”: note well that word “clever.” Can anyone im­agine a great American President—a Washington, a Lincoln—de­scending to such intellectually puerile and morally offensive antics as are here alleged?

But enough of reservation. Freedom and Federalism can be recommended to anyone interested in its subject—and what citizen is not, or should not be?—and es­pecially the parts of it which deal with the merits and prospects of federalism and with the history of the decline of federalism in the United States. If a reader thinks he wants a highly centralized gov­ernment, as against a federal sys­tem, he will find matter here which he would do well to con­sider; if he is already on the side of federalism, he will find here support for his convictions—and who of us does not take pleasure in seeing his own positions, on whatever field of conflict, fortified or defended?

Power And Morality by Pitirim Sorokin and Walter Lunden.(Boston: Porter Sargent. 206 pp. $3.50.)

Reviewed by William H. Peterson

The Prince, declared Machiavelli, must be lion and fox—a lion to de­fend himself against wolves, a fox to recognize traps. To hold power the prince simply could not afford to be all virtue and no sin, or, in the Machiavellian phrase, “a prince who wishes to maintain the State is often forced to do evil.”

The Machiavellian theme of the general incompatibility of political power and ethical principle gets provocative treatment at the hands of the eminent sociologists, Pro­fessors Pitirim Sorokin of Har­vard and Walter Lunden of Iowa State, in their book, Power and Morality. The Sorokin-Lunden analysis of history from the prem­ise that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts ab­solutely” is brilliant and persua­sive. But the authors’ follow-up thesis that the nations of the world should throw away their de­structive weapons and embrace a new kind of world government based on scientific knowledge and creative love, well, is not this lat­ter viewpoint of human nature quite inconsistent with the for­mer?

Nonetheless, the first half of the book, which breaks down history into noble declarations and ignoble policies, is a gem. Politics from Genghis Khan of Cathay to Boss Frank Hague of Jersey City is in­deed a sorry game, almost regard­less of who is playing it. The game is, among other things, a word game. History records millions of innocents who were murdered in massacres, “crusades,” “purges,” “liquidations,” “holy wars,” “res­torations of order” always solemn­ly declared “for the Good of the Country,” “Nationalism,” “Purity of Race,” “God,” and all sorts of justifying mottoes and catchwords aimed at masking the ugly power motives of the rulers.

And no matter what era you pick in ancient, medieval, or mod­ern history, the pattern of power and corruption is virtually inescap­able over the long run. Consider the Byzantine Empire. In Con­stantinople no sovereign was safe. Of the 107 sovereigns that occu­pied the throne between 395 A.D. and 1453 A.D., only 34 died in their beds. The rest either abdicated—mostly unwillingly—or died vio­lently by poison, smothering, stab­bing, mutilation, or strangulation. Some 65 separate revolutions took place during the 1,058 years of Byzantium. Grim stories abound. The devout Irene had her son Con­stantine VI blinded in the very room in which he was born. Leo V, the Armenian, was assassinated in 820 A.D.—in St. Stephen’s chapel. Theophano had her husband mur­dered in the Sacred Palace and his severed head displayed to the soldiers.

Yet the point of all the docu­mented violence is the double standard that pervades history and today’s society. For whether his­tory is judging Theophano of Byz­antium, Catherine the Great of Russia, or Elizabeth I of England, the overriding excuse for violence—then and now—is that beautiful catch-all, raison d’etat (“reason of state”). All too often, the State can do no wrong—the king is above reproach (and nowadays substitute “the people” for “the king”). The petty criminal is by and large caught, tried, and pun­ished. Not so with the criminality of rulers. If anything, history books not only whitewash the criminal acts of the State but parade them as brilliant strokes of statecraft. One is reminded of the old English rhyme:

The law locks up both man and woman

Who steals the goose from off the common,

But lets the greater felon loose,

Who steals the common from the goose.

A New Order?

Where Professors Sorokin and Lunden go off the deep end is in the second half of their book. After their incisive and thorough­ly provocative first half, they go sailing off on a pink cloud of “a new order.” It becomes a confus­ing discussion, filled with dubious economics and facts. Consider this bit about Red Russia (p. 150):

“Side by side with inhuman regi­mentation and enslavement of mil­lions of their citizens, the Soviet and similar regimes have liberated these millions from many forms of previous subjugation and exploitation; inspired them with the dignity of responsible members of the new so­ciety; alleviated the poverty and misery of vast downtrodden masses; opened to all capable citizens high­ways to the highest educational and social positions… [etc., etc.].”

One can sympathize with the desire of the authors for a new order with the awesome prospect of an atomic holocaust close by. One can hail their call for cru­saders of love as opposed to cru­saders of conquest. We need men of the mark of Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave, L’Abbé Pierre, and Albert Schweitzer to turn the love of pow­er into the power of love. With all this, Professors Sorokin and Lun­den score some points; and their call for total universal disarma­ment—if under continuous inspec­tion—makes sense.

But their faith in a “noble civili­zation” makes one wonder. Will human nature be uplifted by the absence of hydrogen weapons? Can politics be purified by scientific knowledge and by saints and sages? Could the Soviet Union be trusted to use what would be the world’s largest police force to but maintain law and order within their own borders? And does not the Sorokin-Lunden documenta­tion of the well-nigh inevitable corruption of power, as detailed in the first half of their book, pre­clude purification based upon the mere banning of overt weapons? For as the authors themselves ask: “Who shall guard the Guard­ians?” Who indeed?

On Planning The Earth by Geoffrey Dobbs, (Liverpool 2, England: K.R.P. Publications, Ltd. (7, Victoria Street), 96 pp. 98¢.)

Reviewed by T. Robert Ingram

Good writing combines with pro­found thinking in this book by Geoffrey Dobbs, Senior Lecturer in Forest Botany at the Uni­versity College of North Wales. On Planning the Earth is a sweep­ing, brilliantly general led attack on large-scale land planning, hydroelectric schemes, and other major reconstructions of the earth’s surface.

Dr. Dobbs has a profound sense of Christian values as they apply to things of the earth and to worldly powers expressed in tem­poral government. He analyzes the “planning” movement as a whole as “the major manipulation of natural resources in the interests of centralized power,” using for his primary example the Tennes­see Valley Authority, held up by planners in Great Britain as an example to be followed. Dr. Dobbs is professionally equipped to deal with the consequences of the TVA in the physical area, but he is equally competent when dealing with the social, political, and re­ligious side effects.

Dr. Dobbs raises questions about the long range effects of the TVA on soil erosion, for ex­ample, which cannot be ignored. More good agricultural land is flooded by the TVA than is re­claimed by irrigation, and the damage done to the productive ele­ments of the earth’s surface is nature’s reply to the promises of the planners.

If the TVA is really an anti-conservation project, despite claims to the contrary, the real in­centive for such land planning and water collection schemes must be sought elsewhere. Perhaps the in­centive is political. Planning im­plies control, and control over the world is an end admirably served by the projects for which the TVA is an admitted model. The powers given to the Authority by Con­gress are such that the “spread of control from water to almost everything else makes an instruc­tive study of the totalitarian na­ture of planning.”

“It has been noted,” Dr. Dobbs writes, “that the rain falls upon the just and the unjust, but such an arrangement is not regarded as fair by our Planners, who would prefer that the rain should be gathered into one place, and then `delegated’ under strict control through the sluices to the people in strict proportion to the ‘justice’ of their claim, as determined by an impartial Committee.”

The importance of the control of water in totalitarian planning is not new. The first centralized state arose on the banks of the Nile on a basis of water control. It is symbolized by the vast slave-built pyramid tombs of its rulers. For the People of God it typified the slavery from which they fled in search of the Promised Land where freedom was supported by the “former rains and the latter rains” that could not be appor­tioned through irrigation systems.

The ultimate evil of centralized planning is that it is “the stealing of choices.” The government com­mittee, by depriving people of the opportunity of making their own choices, thereby reduces them to slavery. “The effect… of making other people’s choices instead of one’s own, is to destroy the per­sonality. It is suicism—suicide of the self (soul); perhaps the only way in which the soul of man can be destroyed.”

It is not merely freedom that is at stake; not even this mortal life. It is the soul of man. This is the prize for which Hell has contended from Paradise on, and for which the Son of God suffered even death at the hands of a world government.