The Flight From Reality: 15 Remaking the Minds of Men

Dr. Carson is Professor of American History at Grove City College, Pennsylvania. Among his earlier writings in THE FREEMAN were his series on The Fateful Turn and The American Tradition, both of which are now available as books.

In the third place, the administrator… will realize that public education is essentially education of the public: directly, through teachers and students in the school; indirectly, through communicating to others his own ideals and standards, inspiring others with the enthusiasm of himself and his sta_ff for the function of intelligence and character in the transformation of society.

-John Dewey, 1937

A new public mind is to be created. How? Only by creating tens of millions of new individual minds and welding them into a new social mind. Old stereo­types must be broken up and new “climates of opinion” formed in the neigh­borhoods of America. But that is the task of the building of a science of society for the schools.        -Harold Rugg, ¹933

… The young should receive careful training in mutual undertakings, in organizational work, and in social’ planning so that they may form the de­sired habits and dispositions.     -George S. Counts, 1952

Nothing is so unlikely as that the established institutions in a society should be used to trans­form and reconstruct society. After all, the institutions derive their reason for being and support from the existing order, if they are not anachronisms. They exist to perpetuate and serve that order. In a word, they are conservative. Certainly, this has almost always been true of such fundamental in­stitutions as the home, the church, and the school. The home has tra­ditionally been the place where the child has been civilized, has been taught rudimentary manners, has been taught how to get along with others, has been nurtured and trained in manners and morality. This training derives largely from the experience of the parents, what they have been taught, and what understanding they have of the world in which they live. The school has been the place for the teaching of the accumulated knowl­edge from the past, and the church has been the rock which served to anchor man in the enduring as he tended to adapt himself to the winds of change. These are con­servative functions, for by them the experience, heritage, knowl­edge, and Revelation are passed from one generation to another.

Yet, in this century, a concerted attempt has been made to under­mine and/or direct these institu­tions to the ends of social recon­struction. Religion, as has been shown, was drawn into the stream of social reform by the social gos­pel. Parents have yielded much of their responsibility for the up­bringing of their children to var­ious social agencies, notably the schools. And, whether they have or not, the authority which they formerly wielded has been re­stricted by new doctrines on child rearing, by the assaults upon cus­tom and tradition, by the loss of confidence in the wisdom embed­ded in the heritage, and by the wedge that has been driven be­tween the old and the young by the “peer group” orientation and conformity. The parents most af­fected by these changes probably fall into two categories (with some overlapping): the “best ed­ucated”—that is, those who have spent the most years in school—and those who are glad enough to avail themselves of the irresponsi­bility that is involved.

That some people should revel in their irresponsibility requires no explanation—though why they should be encouraged to do so does. But that those who should be best educated are inept in approp­riating and using their heritage is a matter warranting careful consideration. This consideration brings us to the subject of this article: the undermining of educa­tion, the transformation of the schools, and the instrumentation of education for melioristic re­form.

Perverting the Tradition

There are few possibilities more remote than that the schools should be made into instruments of reform. It required great in­genuity and imagination to bring it off—a concerted effort over an extended period of time by men dedicated to the task. The reason for such difficulties is not far to seek. Schools have for their task the education of children. Educa­tion has, at least historically, been concerned with conveying knowl­edge; or, at any rate, it has been associated with the acquisition of knowledge. Such knowledge con­sists of the skills, methods, and information which has been learned in times past. To put it another way, knowledge is of what is and what has been. There is no knowledge, in particulars, of what will be in the future, though much may be deduced from a knowledge of the universe and what has happened as to what can and cannot be in the future, but even this is only knowledge of what is and has happened.

But the educational reformers proposed to use schooling as prep­aration for building a different society for the future. That is, they were futuristic, oriented to what would be rather than to what was and had happened. In short, they proposed to use the schools as breeding grounds for social change rather than for education. Theirs was, and is, a flight from the reality of knowledge upon which education is supposedly based. Insofar as such education is focused upon the future, it is usually an uninhibited exercise of the imagination. Insofar as it is an attempt to implant some ideo­logical version of what the future should be like, it is nothing but propaganda. Insofar as it is con­cerned with rooting out tradi­tional ideas and beliefs, it is brain­washing. Insofar as schooling has been turned from imbuing with knowledge to social reconstruc­tion, it has been turned from a solid task to sentimental hopes and vague visions of the future. (But, it may be objected, educa­tion is to prepare one for living in the future. So it is. It is for the future [or the extended pres­ent], but it is of the past and what now is. If there is aught of value to be learned, in school or elsewhere, it has to be of the past and what is.)

Explaining What Happened

There is general agreement that education has been transformed in America in the twentieth cen­tury. Those who have described it, however, have focused upon differ­ent things. Some have emphasized the great increase in numbers in the schools and the larger propor­tion of the young who have stayed in school much longer. Indeed, it is a cliché of the educationists that this accounts mainly for the changes in content and method. It is alleged that education was formerly aristocratic in emphasis and that in the twentieth century it was adjusted to the generality of the young. Some emphasize the impact of new developments in education and the attempts to make it scientific. Others focus upon leaders, movements, and as­sociations.

This account will focus upon three major developments in edu­cation: (1) the undermining of ed­ucation, (2) the reorientation of schooling and its instrumentation to social reform, and (3) the cen­tralizing of control over education. Attention will be centered on the educational reformers, their aims and accomplishments. It should be clear that this results in only a partial account of what has hap­pened in education. The reformers have quite often been thwarted in their aims by determined class­room teachers, by resisting ad­ministrators, and by the tendency of people to continue established methods. Still, the reformers have succeeded, much more than they have been inclined to admit, in transforming the schools.

Progressive Education

The main impetus to educational reform and the central tendency of it came from the Progressive Education movement. The chief proponent, and later patron saint, of Progressive Education was John Dewey. As early as 1897 he declared that “education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.”¹ In The School and Society (1899), “the school is cast as a lever of social change, educational theory, becomes political theory, and the educator is inevitably cast into the struggle for social reform.”² He was to follow this with many articles and books on education, and the theme of reform is always there, either in the forefront or as assumption. As has been pointed out before, Dewey was a central figure for reform in gen­eral. He had come under the in­fluence of a new conception of reality and was an indefatigable worker in trying to bring this world into conformity with it. Dewey would, and did, put the matter otherwise: he had per­ceived the underlying direction that things were taking and used his energies to try to persuade men to make the appropriate ad­justments and changes so that they might stay in the stream of history. He was a monist, a melio­rist, an antitraditionalist, a social analyst, an environmentalist (mod­ified), an equalitarian, a demo­cratist, a historicist—in short, a Progressive.

Dewey was under the sway of a new conception of reality. What was real to him was change, soci­ety, and psyche. His ideas stem from William James, from G. W. F. Hegel, from Charles Darwin, from Lester Frank Ward, and from the gradualist revision of Marx­ism. His conception of change had the mystical overtones conferred upon it by Hegelianism, Darwin­ism, and the reform Darwinists. It was something produced by such “forces” as industrialization; it was not to be denied, but it could be controlled and directed by human ingenuity. What was important to him was society. It was the firm reality in terms of which one acted, wrought changes, and made improvements. He wrote much about the individual, about individual freedom, about the in­dividual child, but the reality within which the individual moved and had his being was always so­ciety. The psyche was both the obstacle to reform and the means by which reform was to be brought about.

Dewey was not so much an in­novator as a prodigiously produc­tive amplifier. He was in a stream of American reformers—Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Lester Frank Ward, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and so forth—which goes back into the nineteenth century, and which broadened and became more numerous in the twentieth. Moreover, many of these conceived of this social function for educa­tion. To Lester Frank Ward, ac­cording to one historian, “educa­tion was the ‘great panacea’—for political as for all others evils.”3 Albion Small, a disciple of Ward, declared in the 1890′s, “Sociology knows no means for the ameliora­tion or reform of society more rad­ical than those of which teachers hold the leverage…. The teacher who realizes his social function will not be satisfied with passing chil­dren to the next grade. He will read his success only in the record of men and women who go from the school… zealous to do their part in making a better future.” In 1911, Charles A. Ellwood wrote that the schools should be used as “the conscious instrument of so­cial reconstruction. “⁵ A few years later, Ernest R. Groves proclaimed that “society can largely deter­mine individual characteristics, and for its future well-being it needs more and more to demand that the public schools contribute significantly and not incidentally to its pressing needs by a social use of the influence that the schools have over the individual in his sensitive period of immaturity.”6

Dewey was by no means alone, even at the beginning, but he was a central figure. He went to Columbia University to profess phi­losophy in 1904, and taught there until his retirement in 1930. Teachers College at Columbia University became the center from which so many of the doctrines of Progressive Education were spread to the rest of the country. Many of the most influential of its spokesmen held forth there: William H. Kilpatrick, Harold Rugg, George S. Counts, and others.^? One historian, though eager to disclaim any untoward implications, points up the influ­ence of William H. Kilpatrick, a student and disciple of Dewey:

In all he taught some 35,000 stu­dents from every state in the Union at a time when Teachers College was training a substantial percentage of the articulate leaders of American education. Any competent teacher occupying the senior chair of phi­losophy of education at the College between 1918 and 1938 would have exerted a prodigious influence on educational theory and practice. In the hands of the dedicated, compel­ling Kilpatrick, the chair became an extraordinary strategic rostrum for the dissemination of a particular version of progressive education….8

Others spread the word from rostrums in other universities: Boyd Henry Bode at Ohio State University, Theodore Brameld at the University of Minnesota, and many lesser known names in hundreds of departments and schools of educa­tion in American colleges and universities.

The Rise of Relativism

Before the New Education, or New Schooling as it should be called, could be installed, however, the old education had to be dis­credited and displaced. The dis­crediting of the old has gone on for many years and at many levels. The deepest level of attack was the philosophical, and at this level it was an attack upon the possibil­ity of knowledge. Throughout a long career John Dewey carried on a running attack upon abso­lutes—that is, upon all claims to truth, to established knowledge, to any fixity in the universe. Dewey was a relativist, as have most of the Progressives been. The following are examples of Dewey’s own avowal of relativity:

Reference to place and time in what has just been said should make it clear that this view of the office of philosophy has no commerce with the notion that the problems of phi­losophy are “eternal.” On the con­trary, it holds that such a view is obstructive..

This movement is charged with promotion of “relativism” in a sense in which the latter is identified with lack of standards…. It is true that the movement in question holds since the problems and issues of philosophy are not eternal they should link up with urgencies that impose them­selves at times and in places.°

Dewey was, of course, a master of answering criticism by mis­contruing the objections to his philosophy. Surely no one was taking him to task for dealing with contemporary issues, or deny­ing that what interests men may change from time to time. The question was rather of whether or not there are enduring principles and laws in terms of which ques­tions may be settled. Dewey did not believe that there are. He af­firmed his relativism in what was for him a rare lack of ambiguity in the following words:

In the second place, liberalism is committed to the idea of historic relativity. It knows that the content of the individual and freedom change with time; that this is as true of so­cial change as it is of individual de­velopment from infancy to maturity. The positive counterpart of opposi­tion to doctrinal absolutism is ex­perimentalism. The connection be­tween historic relativity and experi­mental method is intrinsic. Time signifies change. The significance of individuality with respect to social policies alters with change of the conditions in which individuals live.¹º

In short, everything is continually changing.  Other Progressives attacked the belief in established truth and proclaimed their relativism. Note the disdain which William H. Kil­patrick had for those who believe in truth:

When people have interests they wish to hold undisturbed, they fall naturally into this older Platonic logic and, as if they had some pri­vate access to absolute truth which establishes beyond question the posi­tions they wish to uphold, call all new ideas… subvertive and pervertive. These people in their hearts re­ject freedom of speech and freedom of study because they themselves al­ready have “the truth” and these freedoms might if followed “subvert” their “truth.”¹¹

Boyd Henry Bode asks us:

… to consider the nature of an edu­cational system which centers on the cultivation of intelligence, rather than submission to authority. Such a system recognizes no absolute or final truths, since these always rep­resent authority in one form or an­other, and since they impose arbitra­ry limits on social progress and the continuous enrichment of experience.¹²

The Tradition Undermined

The relativism of the Progres­sives is a crucial point for their educational theories. If there is no truth, it is appropriate to inquire what education is about. Why should children be sent to school? Why should there be a huge edu­cational establishment? The Pro­gressives had answers to these questions which satisfied them, but their answers will be told at the proper place below. The point here is that the relativistic posi­tion served as the point of de­parture for the undermining of traditional education. If there is no truth, the teacher who lectures to his class is indoctrinating or propagandizing them. If nothing is established, the giving and grading of examinations is a spurious undertaking. If there is nothing enduring, the teaching of subject matter is surely a waste of time.

The assault upon education was not usually carried on in so blunt a fashion; had it been, it is doubt­ful that it would have been as suc­cessful as it was. It was conducted on a more piecemeal basis, until many of the traditional courses and methods had been discredited. The traditional schools were charged with being aristocratic, with perpetuating inequalities and being unsuited to the generality. Educational reformers parodied the idea of mental discipline and held their distortion of it up to scorn. Many of the subjects were virtually useless, they claimed; for example, Latin, higher mathe­matics, and various other “cul­tural” courses. (At the beginning of the twentieth century, “culture” did not have its present high standing among “democrats.”) Drilling in facts was deplored, along with emphasis upon content itself. The teacher who exercised authority was castigated as an autocrat. In short, they tended to undermine the authority of the teacher, discredit the courses of study, deplore the imparting of information, and assail disciplin­ary techniques.¹3

The traditional was disparaged and conservatives denounced by Progressives. For example, Dewey declared that the “traditional scheme is, in essence, one of im­position from above and from out­side. It imposes adult standards, subject-matter, and methods upon those who are only growing slowly toward maturity.¹⁴ Kilpatrick claimed that there were many conditions hampering the schools from performing their social func­tion. “Most obvious among such hindering conditions stands the common tradition… that the work of the school is properly limited to a few simple and formal school subjects, the assigning of lessons in these, and hearing the pupils recite what had been as­signed.”

In short, “the traditional school was thus a place where lessons were assigned and recited…. To each question asked there was al­ways one and only one right an­swer. Subject-matter was, on this theory, the kind of thing that could be assigned and then re­quired under penalty. If the as­signment were not recited pre­cisely as required, the pupil could be held responsible….”^¹5 Dewey called for the “modification of tra­ditional ideals of culture, tradi­tional subjects of study and tra­ditional methods of teaching and discipline….”¹6

Thinking Undermined

Dewey spoke favorably of rea­son and intelligence, but the tra­ditional modes for training and sharpening these were largely displaced from the schools. One historian points out that the acad­emies, and presumably many of the other types of high schools as well, used to teach, among other things, political economy, ethics, moral philosophy, mental philos­ophy, mental science, and logic.¹7 Undoubtedly, there was much that was open to criticism in the older education, as there is with all hu­man undertakings. But Bernard Iddings Bell makes some informa­tive points about it. “Latin and Greek did teach language qua lan­guage. There was almost no in­struction in English, but young people who learned how to use other languages found themselves surprisingly proficient in the use of their own.” Moreover, “the use of symbols and graphs in algebra and geometry and trigonometry and the insistence upon the su­premacy of logic in mathematics did make for sound abstract think­ing.”

He concludes that those “who advocate the new subjects seem to suppose that their critics are vexed merely because they are no longer willing to teach the ancient languages or some other particu­lar course sanctioned by tradi­tion. This is not the real source of criticism. The point is that the older schools taught their students to think and that the newer schools mostly do not.”^¹8 My larger point, which the above tends to bear out, is that the ad­vocates of Progressive Education were undermining education it­self.

This will become clearer by ex­amining what they proposed to substitute for the older education. It should be clear that the Pro­gressives did not believe that there was any body of knowledge to be purveyed in the schools. There was no enduring reality, on their view, to which such a body of knowledge could refer. Nor were they overly enthusiastic about skills and methods, for these, too, would change with changing conditions. Two things might be worthy of study, in the manner in which learning has been conceived traditionally: contempo­rary conditions and the historical forces and trends at work.

Conditioning the Child for Social Reconstruction

There was a two-fold purpose of education: (1) training the child to adjust to changing condi­tions, and (2) developing in the student a favorable attitude toward and ways of thought suited to continuous social recon­struction. These two purposes were not separate; rather, they were intertwined. Taken together, virtually all of the recommenda­tions and programs of Progres­sive Education can be subsumed under them. The programs that are a part of the adjustment motif also fit into a larger pat­tern.

Education should be child cen­tered, not subject matter centered, they said. They were able to evoke with this slogan a great deal of sentimentality which people have come to lavish upon children. Moreover, the rationale for child centeredness in education had a rather long, if not respected, his­torical background. It went back to Rousseau, to Froebel, to Pesta­lozzi, and came down through E. L. Thorndike and John Dewey. Fundamentally, it held that chil­dren are naturally good, that each of them has his own little person­ality which unfolds as he grows up (maturation was the scien­tistic term applied to this), that if he is allowed to develop freely and spontaneously the natural (and good) product will emerge, and that the teacher should be a kind of midwife in the process. These doctrines, like most others, can probably be traced back to Plato.

Dewey and his disciples sub­sumed the residues of these ideas into their ideology and turned them to the purpose of socializing the child. Child-centered school­ing, in this framework, takes the authority away from the teacher for imposing an order upon the experience and from teaching certain things. It vests the deter­mination of this in the children.

Many methods were devised for doing this: the discussion method in class, in which each child “ex­presses” himself; the curving of grades, which places the “stand­ard” in the class rather than with the teacher; social promotion, by which a child is kept with those of his same age regardless of achievement.

Child-Centered Socialism

The Progressives talked much about the individual child, and many have supposed that this was the central concern. Some may have supposed this was the aim, and adopted it as their own, but the child-centered method does not individualize; it socializes. The facts are these: a child is not a fully developed individual; usually, he does not know what he wants; he has only a very limited number of ideas to express; his will is undisciplined; he does not know what to do in most circum­stances. In short, he turns to those around him for guidance and for standards. If the teacher, or an adult, does not direct him, he turns, perhaps gladly and some­times initially, to the other chil­dren. John Dewey knew this. He said:

The conclusion is that in what are called the new schools, the primary source of social control resides in the very nature of the work done asa social enterprise in which all in­dividuals have an opportunity to con­tribute and to which all feel a re­sponsibility. Most children are nat­urally “sociable.” A genuine com­munity life has its ground in this natural sociability.¹9

What Dewey was saying was that the new schools would bring the child under the social control of the group because of the nat­ural “sociability” of children. The teacher need not be excluded en­tirely from the process, of course. As Dewey said:

… When pupils were a class rather than a social group, the teach­er necessarily acted largely from the outside, not as a director of proc­esses of exchange in which all had a share. When education is based upon experience and educative ex­perience is seen to be a social proc­ess, the situation changes radically. The teacher loses the position of ex­ternal boss or dictator but takes on that of leader of group activities.²º

A cheer leader, one supposes, by which the uninformed utterances of children are encouraged and rewarded!

The process would be one, in­eluctably, of adjustment of the child to the group. More broadly, however, the group would be ad­justing to the contemporary situation, or, at any rate, shifting to every wind that blew. Children, so untaught, would have nothing upon which to base their actions but what other children did; all would likely follow the line of least resistance by yielding to whatever pressure was exerted upon them from whatever quar­ter. They would know nothing but the momentary, would see no far­ther than the end of their collec­tive nose, would be, in a word, conformers and adjusters.

This would fit them for the larger, and ultimate, purpose of Progressive Education—social re­construction. Children who have little besides their shared ignor­ance upon which to base their ideas can be readily drawn into the orbit of social visionaries. They can be, and have been, filled with notions of the goodness of people, of how everybody de­serves this or that, of how unjust certain things are, and so on. They would have no clear notion of the limiting character of the universe, of cause and effect, of an order which makes things turn out the way they do. They would have been encouraged to assert their wills (“express” themselves) and have no reason to suppose that the way they (collectively) think that things ought to be would not be the way they could be. In short, they would be ad­mirably fitted out with the pre­tensions of social reformers.

Changing the Social Order

There can be no valid reason for doubting that the Progressive Education leaders conceived of so­cial reconstruction as the prime function of schooling. This strain runs through their writings from the earliest to the latest. They have differed from time to time as to the bluntness with which they stated it (it reached its ap­ogee in the 1930′s), but it has been a continual refrain. Dewey declared at the outset that “the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.”^²¹¹ Many years later he proclaimed the view that “the schools will surely as a matter of fact and not of ideal share in the building of the social order of the future…. They will of necessity… take an active part in determining the social or­der….²²

George S. Counts said, “In the collectivist society now emerging the school should be regarded… as an agency for the abolition of all artificial social distinctions and of organizing the energies of the nation for the promotion of the general welfare…. Throughout the school program the develop­ment of the social order rather than the egoistic impulses should be stressed; and the motive of personal aggrandizement should be subordinated to social ends.”²³ Harold Rugg maintained that changes that have occurred neces­sitate “the scrapping of the formal school and setting up of a thor­oughly new one.” The reason for this is that “the climates of opin­ion of American communities, those now dictated by the domi­nant groups that own and control the economic system, must be made over….24

In order to use the schools in this way, the habits and training of teachers had to be changed, for, above all, it was the teachers who could assure this employment of the schools. Harold Rugg de­scribed one aspect of the program in this way:

Summing the matter up, then, I see the necessary strategy of the educator in educational and social reconstruction as that of (1) creat­ing intelligent understanding in a large minority of the people, (2) practicing them continually in mak­ing group decisions concerning their local and national issues, and (3) having them constantly exert pres­sure upon legislators and executives.

 Goodwin Watson gives these pointers to teachers on how to develop social reform habits:

… When the young student goes to visit the tenements of crowded slum areas, he is working on the first level…. When he joins a hous­ing movement or association…, he begins participation. As he begins to accept committee assignments, he enters the third stage…. When he goes out into a community back­ward in its housing and succeeds in starting some effective action, his development has reached the stage where he can initiate on his own responsibility…. Activity in aid­ing unemployed youth, in consumer’s co-operatives, inter-racial good will, world peace, public health, parent education, political parties… will follow a similar course.²⁶

Harold Rugg held that “the teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most of their conquest…. To the ex­tent that they are permitted to fashion the curriculum and the procedures of the school they will definitely and positively influence the social attitudes, ideals, and behavior of the coming genera­tion.” ²⁷

By Force, If Necessary

The character of the social re­construction which Progressives had in mind should not be left in doubt. Though they may have differed as to the extent to which society should be reconstructed and as to how this should be done, they did not differ in believing that it would involve radical change. John Dewey said, “In or­der to endure under present con­ditions, liberalism must become radical in the sense that, instead of using social power to amelio­rate the evil consequences of the existing system, it shall use power to change the system.”²⁸ An ex­amination of the writings of a goodly number of these men indi­cates that they favored a direc­tion which is generically known as socialism.

As a matter of fact—and it is a hard and enduring fact—people do not generally want to be made over. They do not want themselves and their society (for a given so­ciety is all the people in it) re­constructed according to some­body’s blueprint. Certainly, par­ents do not want their children used as instruments of such re­construction nor the schools turned into social reform institutes. Par­ents, insofar as they give such matters thought, want children to be made into adults for the societyin which they live. The Progres­sives faced tremendous obstacles all along the way. Parents wanted the old education, at least in sub­stance; school boards resisted their innovations; teachers persisted in teaching as if they had some knowledge to purvey.

Instruments of the State

The schools were, however, an attractive target for social re­formers from the outset. Many of them were tax supported by the beginning of the twentieth cen­tury, and by then or within a few years all of the states compelled attendance. Early in the twentieth century, David Snedden noted that the schools were “the only educa­tional institutions which society, in its collective and conscious ca­pacity, acting thru the state, is able to control.” In these, an edu­cation could be introduced which proceeded “from the broadest pos­sible conception of society recon­structing itself.”²⁹ But this was easier said than done. Schools were usually locally controlled, frequently locally financed, under the keeping and direction of local boards of trustees. These were resistant to the innovations that the Progressives advanced.

To accomplish the ends which they sought, the schools had to be brought under their power and control. The effort to accomplish this was conducted on many fronts, always under such rubrics as “efficiency,” “modernization,” and “progress.” Subtle attacks upon “reactionary” boards, com­munities, and parents were carried on. Patriotic groups were de­famed.” More to the point, con­trol of the schools was shifted away from local control. States be­gan to supplement the income of schools, certify teachers, provide normal schools and schools of edu­cation, and to specify courses of study. School districts were con­solidated, and school buildings located away from many commu­nities. Courses in “education” were required for teachers in the pub­lic schools, which usually brought them under the influence of Pro­gressives. Teachers were given tenure, which tended to remove them from the disciplinary power of local communities. Various and sundry slogans and ideas were promulgated to render the resist­ance of the patrons of the schools of no effect. If parents object to some book being used in the schools, they are accused of “cen­sorship” and “book burning.” If they object to what is being taught, they are accused of violat­ing the “academic freedom” of the teachers. That Progressives were frequently aware of precisely what they were doing should be clear from this statement by John Dewey:

In short, the social significance of academic freedom lies in the fact that without freedom of inquiry and freedom on the part of the teachers and students to explore the forces at work in society and the means by which they may be directed, the habits of intelligent action that are necessary to the orderly development of society cannot be created.”

In short, academic freedom is necessary so that the schools may be used for social reconstruction. Another device developed by the educationists for protection of themselves from the “vulgar” is a scientistic jargon.

Methods and Results of Progressivism Summarized

A complete account of how pro­gressivism entered the schools would call attention to the changes in the curriculum, to the sub­mergence of such disciplinary stud­ies as history and geography in something called “social studies,” to the introduction of the problem-solving technique (which is an imaginative way to get students to become reformist minded), to the writing of textbooks informed in the new ethos, and so on. But enough has been told to suggest the character of the rest.

The Progressives have not suc­ceeded, of course, in completely undermining education. Many ded­icated teachers have persisted in teaching fundamentals, at least in the lower grades. Many admin­istrators and boards of education have limited the extent to which changes were made. Even so, the Progressives succeeded much bet­ter than most of them have ever admitted. They have managed to introduce group-consciousness and ideas of adjustment into the very heart of the schooling process. They have convinced many young people that the welfare state is inevitable, that it is democratic to advance social reforms, and that there is little to nothing to be learned from the past. Their effort has resulted in a tendency for the young (in their “peer groups”) to be oblivious to adults, for schools to be separated from com­munities, for children to be igno­rant of or contemptuous of their heritage and tradition, and for childhood to be perpetuated beyond its normal years.

Thus have young minds been shaped to strange ends, and thus have Americans proceeded on their flight from reality. To what end? Bernard Iddings Bell summed it up felicitously, if fearfully, some years ago:

When men or nations get tired of dodging fundamental questions in a multitude of distractions, they turn to a search for something else that will, so they suppose, give them the sense of significance which they know they lack…. If they remain adolescent in their approach to life they are frequently tempted to seek meaning for themselves and for their nation in terms of coercive power. They develop a Messianic complex. They seek to live other people’s lives for them, ostensibly for the good of those other people but really in the hope of fulfilling themselves.³²

The next article in this series will discuss the transition
“From Ideology to Mythology—I.”

Foot Notes

¹ Quoted in Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), p. 100.

² Ibid., p. 118.

³ Henry S. Commager, The American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), p. 214.

⁴ Quoted in Cremin, op. cit., p. 99.

⁵ Quoted in Edward A. Krug, The Shaping of the American High School (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 254.

⁶ Ibid., p. 254.

⁷ See Augustin G. Rudd, Bending the Twig (Chicago: Heritage Foundation, 1957), pp. 235-37.

⁸ Cremin, op. cit., p. 220.

⁹ John Dewey, Problems of Men (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), p. 12.

¹⁰ Ibid., pp. 136-37.

¹¹ William H. Kilpatrick, ed., The Teacher and Society (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1937), p. 36.

¹² Joe Park, Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 153.

¹³ For examples of such criticisms, see Krug, op. cit., p