This lecture is the second Hillsdale College Summer Hostel Program lecture on the principles underlying American education.
On July 4, 2014, The New York Times published a new Declaration of Independence. You may have missed it. Written by Jennifer Barnett, who is described as “Teacher Leader in Residence for the Center for Teaching Quality” in North Carolina, the “Declaration for Teachers” mimics some of Thomas Jefferson’s language—although unlike Jefferson’s declaration, which is a logical syllogism, this one consists merely of a series of assertions. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” she bravely begins, “that all teachers are valuable, and that are endowed by their skill and expertise with a certain unalienable right to lead.” What is more, “Educational systems must be designed to serve students, deriving their power from the consent of teachers. Whenever any school or system forgets its way, it is the right of the teachers to alter or abolish it.”
Now, you may have assumed that local citizens governed public schools, that consent for the establishment and maintenance of your schools came from such practices as school board elections and budget referendums. Well, silly you. “No longer will teachers allow what seems to be in direct object”—I think she means “opposition,” but vocabulary may not be her strongest suit—”to their service dictate what is best for students or their profession.” What we need, rather, are “teacher-powered schools” in which “teacher leadership” is, because it “ought to be,” “the foundations upon which education lies.”
The Center for Teaching Quality receives part of its funding from—you guessed it—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So we know where their money comes from. But you may be asking, ‘Where do such astonishing notions as these come from?’ The answer in this case, and in almost all cases in American public education for the past hundred years, is the Gospel According to John—John Dewey, that is. The religious language is apt because in 1897 Dewey titled one of his most influential essays, “My Pedagogic Creed.” There he wrote, “The teacher is engaged, not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life. I believe that every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling; that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of right social growth. I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.”
A teacher-leader, indeed: “education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform,” “the only sure method of social reconstruction.” The true kingdom of God means just such a reconstructed human society, which means that the true God, according to the apostle of “My Pedagogic Creed,” is none other than humanity—as one would expect from a co-signer of the original, 1933, version of “The Humanist Manifesto.” Previously, the word ‘humanism’ had meant the practice of the humanities; a humanist was one who studied and taught literature, philosophy and the other liberal arts. The liberal arts composed the heart of the curriculum of the old universities, founded under the aegis of, first, the Catholic Church and then the Protestant churches. But the new humanism rejected the religious framework of the old liberal arts and took upon itself the model of social science, modeled on the applied mathematics of engineering and also on the scientific method of experimentation–in this case, social experimentation.
If Ms. Barnett received her ideas indirectly from John Dewey, where did Dewey get them? Born in Vermont in 1859, Dewey received his Ph. D from the Johns Hopkins University—as did the other of the two most important first-generation American Progressives, Woodrow Wilson. Johns Hopkins was the first American university animated by the principles of German philosophy and modeled upon the German notion of the research university. German philosophy in America derived from the thought of the nineteenth-century philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel put moral and political philosophy on an entirely new foundation, a foundation opposed to the philosophic foundation of the American founding, which combined ideas derived from the classic liberal education with strong elements of the modern, scientific education proposed by Francis Bacon and others.
As you know, the American Founders looked to the laws of nature and of nature’s God as the basis of moral and political right. All men are created equal, not in intelligence, character, or physical appearance but in their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. those unalienable rights—as distinguished from the supposedly unalienable right of teacher-leaders to run our schools—are what governments are intended to secure. The United States Constitution constitutes the American federal government and serves as the supreme human law of the land, under the laws of nature and of nature’s God.
Hegel took morality and politics—including political economy—in a decidedly new direction. Hegel regarded both natural right and the God of the Bible as myths. These myths served humanity ‘back in their day’—Hegel regarded the teachings of the Bible as superior to the paganisms they replaced—but ‘that was then and this is now.’ We’ve outgrown such things.
What is real, not mythological, is history—history defined as the evolution of all matter and all energy toward their apex, toward their end, toward their purpose—namely, the thoroughgoing domination o the human mind over all of nature. The laws of nature and of nature’s God are no longer the standard because we can now conquer nature. Politically and economically, this will mean a worldwide human society or world state. The role of education and of educator in this scheme is to serve each national state by leading each nation toward this new version of the KIngdom of God. Thus the new, scientistic ‘humanism’ will serve a new liberalism—a liberalism defined not in terms of individual liberty or popular self-government but in terms of the liberation of all humanity from the shackles of nature and of the old religions in a fully rational world-state governed by bureaucracies staffed by university-educated experts in scientific administration.
In America, Hegel’s ideas became prominent in the middle of the nineteenth century, seen in the school of thought known as the Saint Louis Hegelians. Just as subsequent thinkers took the basic structure of Hegelian thought (specifically its claim that moral and political right derives from the dialectical clash of opposing forces in the course of human events) in a variety of directions—from Marxism on the ‘Left’ to race theory on the ‘Right’—the Saint Louis Hegelians divided into a left wing and a right wing. The right wing became known as Social Darwinists. The left wing eventually became the American Progressives.
The most prominent of the Social-Darwinist Hegelians was William Torrey Harris who served as President Grant’s Education Commissioner in the 1870s. Among the most prominent on the left wing of Saint Hegelianism was George Sylvester Morris. Morris Taught at Johns Hopkins in the early 1880s, when Dewey and Wilson were graduate students. Both men went on to careers in education: Wilson eventually becoming the president of Princeton, Dewey going first to the University of Michigan, where Morris had arranged for his appointment, then to the University of Chicago—another German-style research university—and then and most strategically to Columbia University, and particularly at its famous Teacher’s College—for decades the most prestigious college for professional educators in the United States.
For Dewey, for Wilson, and for the American Progressives generally, the American founding—based upon the old philosophy of liberty, the old liberalism of natural right—was good for its time but now obsolete. A new liberalism was needed, one based on historical right or progress and not the unalienable, natural rights of the old Declaration of Independence that the old Constitution was designed to secure. The new, “elastic,” “organic,” or “living” Constitution would systematically grow the central state, keeping pace with the growth of the size and complexity of American society and, not incidentally, providing employment for university-trained, tenured administrators and public-school teachers. Thus the liberal education that formed the minds of the American Founders was also obsolete, to be replaced by a new liberal education for the new liberalism or administrative statism. In the first years of the twentieth century the professional classes would form the core of the Progressie movement in all its political campaigns. Whereas Marxism, a form of historical-dialectical materialism sought assumed that revolution would come at the hands of the factory workers, Progressivism, which retained more of the historical-dialectical idealism of the Hegelian wellspring of historicism assumed that revolution could be peaceful, well-managed by the professional classes, practitioners of planning not of physical labor.
Dewey attempted to combine the idealist and materialist dimensions of historicism, usually to the advantage of materialism. Philosophy, which had once attempted to understand human nature as something fixed and imperfect, must now dedicate itself to social, economic, and political progress aimed at perfecting human beings. Dewey shares with Marx the rejection of natural right and an esteem for social egalitarianism. He also shares with Marx and evolutionary form of materialism. But he sharply disagrees with Marx, and thus opposed Soviet Communism, on two crucial matters: the regime of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the use of class warfare as the means of social progress. According to the more peaceful gospel of John Dewey, education via the scientific method is the true vehicle of social change and such education should serve not a ‘top-down’ regime of dictatorship but a civil, republican regime of social experimentation and pluralism. The dialectic remains, but it is the dialectic modeled on the laboratory not on the clashes of crowds in the street. It is a dialectic for which urban professionals find themselves well-suited and, in the Deweyan classroom well-trained.
With Dewey, the school is now reconceived as the laboratory of social progress. Children must not compete against one another in school. They should learn by cooperating with one another in group projects. “I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the [human] race,” Dewey wrote in My Pedagogic Creed. Such participation begins not with intellectual training—learning our ABCs—but with what we now call ‘hands-on’ projects: cooking, sewing, manual training of various sorts. Dewey aims at fusing the mentality of the working class with the mentality of the intellectual class, all in the service of forming one all-encompassing class of citizens who are socially equal, not equal merely in terms of their natural, unalienable rights. The state, as Dewey conceived it, following Hegel, is an organic unity, an organism, which harmonizes the relations of all social associations with it, including the careful regulation of business. The school is the brain of the social organism that is the state. The teacher thus does indeed become the true leader of human society, along with other professional public administrators who form part of the modern state’s nervous system or bureaucracy.
To give you an idea of how far Dewey ‘socialized’ human life—because this went far beyond mere socialism in economics or democracy in politics—I point to his theory of how children learn. When he says that “all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race,” he gives as his example the human infant. It is (he alleges) “through the response which is made to the child’s instinctive babblings [that] the child comes to know what the babblings mean.” My own impression is that children already know exactly what their instinctive babblings mean. It is rather for the parents to figure out what the child is babbling about, and then to decide whether the child should get what he wants. It is further for the child then to understand the language in which the parents command, cajole, and teach him. After understanding that language (including the words that form sentences like “No!” and, after some schooling, “All men are created equal”), the child can then move on to live a meaningful life in the service of the God who created the terms and conditions of life including the nature governed by His laws. That is the kind of primary education which culminated in the old liberal education seen in the old colleges and universities of Europe and America, the education that modern philosophy pushed toward experimental science without ever entirely jettisoning the old humanism. That education had formed and informed the old liberalism—the liberalism of self-government, of individual and citizen liberty founded upon equality of natural rights.
Dewey directs his attention principally at elementary education. For a consideration of university education under the aegis of Progressivism, we turn to Woodrow Wilson. Wilson also exemplifies an important dimension of the original Progressivism not seen in Dewey: a serious Christian element. Although the universities of our own time have abandoned Christianity, they had not and could not have done so in Wilson’s time. More broadly, down through the civil rights movement of the Martin Luther King era, the new liberalism had a serious Christian dimension.
The Christian element of Progressivism correlates strongly with the non-bureaucratic, non-technical side of Progressivism—the figure of the opinion leader. Son of a Presbyterian minister, Wilson was trained in public speaking from childhood. He knew that most of his fellow citizens were not, but he also knew that they grew up listening to sermons and political orations. “We shall always be ruled by orators so long as we attempt self-government,” government by persuasion and consent. Because a large nation cannot rule itself directly, but needs to elect representatives, citizens must learn to make speeches, or at least to listen discerningly to them. “Literate citizens, fitted to form judgments in affairs, to vote, to choose from among their neighbors those who shall be fit for government,” should be the products of the public school. To ensure the verbal abilities and the knowledge of the trajectory of history a self-governing people must have, universal public education is indispensable; “it is the height of unwisdom to leave it to chance or to charity.”
Wilson had no misty, idealized view of this process or its purposes. Along with religion, “education is one of the highest and most effective police agencies,” preventing the idleness that is “the mother of a great host of the lesser crimes from which communities suffer.” For example, elementary schooling will help to solve the race problem of the South, a problem Wilson attributes to whites’ reluctance to share government with “an ignorant and inferior race,” currently “unfit for self-government.” “For their elevation [Southern blacks] need liberal and powerful aid and systematic encouragement,” including compulsory education, which may in time transform them into “an exceedingly valuable, because steady and hardy, peasantry.” Wilson hold out no higher hopes for black uplift than that. Given the Progressives’ adherence to ‘race science’—cutting-edge science at the time—Wilson held less sensible opinions on the prospects for the education of black Americans than Benjamin Franklin had done. Public schooling will also prevent the continued spread of Roman Catholicism, whose Church hierarchy “adheres with desperate determination to the purpose of absolutely controlling the education of the youth of its communion.” Because “they who control the education of the youth of any community control the social and political destiny of that community,” public schooling alone can assure provision for a nonsectarian education that puts arithmetic and geometry ahead of catechism.
It was when he considered higher education that Wilson rose above the level of these banalities. As president of Princeton University, Wilson helped to invent the liberal arts college of the twentieth century. In his conception, renewed colleges and universities would supply the leaders of the citizens formed by the public schools, “a few chosen, however, not by birth, but by ambition, by opportunity, by the compulsion of gifts of initiative, by the dictates of that higher sort of necessity which puts social compulsion upon men to stand at the front offer themselves as guides”—as men who are “experts in the relations of things.”
Experts in the relations of things are not the same as experts in things, masters of minutiae, fit staffers within the administrative state or the corporate bureaucracies. “Government is as important as industry—not only the thing we formally call government, but also the government of right thinking, of clear thoughtful planning of minds trained to see things in wholes and combinations, divorced from special interests and released upon the general field of thought and observation.” Without hereditary leaders, democracies need a real elite, one schooled in the “new universe of knowledge” beyond “the old discipline of Greek, Latin, Mathematics, and English.” Scientific knowledge must be added, and (note the Hegelian language) as “the final synthesis of learning,” philosophy. But learning along will not suffice. “Not many pupils of a College are to be investigators: they are to be citizens and the world’s servants in every field of practical endeavor.” “No longer stand[ing] aloof from the natural world,” the university cannot afford, by means of an exclusive emphasis on science, to inculcate agnosticism in philosophy and anarchism in politics. “The spirit of morality was changed and established once and for all by the coming of Christ into the world”; Princeton and other private colleges and universities must foster that spirit. Wilson goes so far as to claim that “scholarship has never, so far as I can at this moment recollect, been associated with any religion except the religion of Jesus Christ.” Leaving aside the likely objections of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Confucians and others to that claim, the key thing to notice is that Wilson combines the notion of philosophic synthesis, expertise in the relations of things, deriving from Hegel, with (Protestant) Christian morality.
Christian education of leaders would proceed indirectly. “Character cannot be deliberately produced. Anybody who goes to work to produce a good character in himself will produce nothing but a prig.” Character develops only through a structure of duties. Since “no one has ever dreamed of” imparting erudition to undergraduates—the time being too short—college should teach “mental discipline.” Because “some things discipline the mind, and some do not,” all subjects cannot be equal. Wilson rejected the Harvard system of free electives enacted by its president, Charles Norton Eliot, as “a confusing variety of studies, a bill of fare which [the student] could not possibly eat through with digestion”—a criticism that would presumably apply to Jefferson’s University of Virginia, as well. Professors know better than undergraduates the courses of study that will discipline the mind. an older student may elect a course of studies among various curricula, but foundational studies of pure (not applied science, philosophy, and literature must be finished first.
Beyond curricular structure, Wilson sought to structure Princeton itself as “a self-governing community, fundamentally democratic in its constitution,” so that graduates will not leave as “the innocent youngsters and easily gulled tyros” they may have been upon arrival. To speed this maturation, Wilson introduced the precept system, modeled on the English universities whereby students are tutored individually or in small groups by senior scholars. A real community cannot have faculty and students living dual-track lives, with the teacher not knowing “what the undergraduate is thinking about or what models he is forming his life upon,” and with the undergraduate “not knowing how human a fellow the teacher is” and “how many interesting things both his life and his studies illustrate and make attractive.” The preceptor functions as “guide, philosopher, and friend” assigned to the student upon declaring a major, selecting the books they will read together. The Christian Progressive preceptor leads privately, as the Christian Progressive statesman does publicly.
Wilson also intended to restructure the physical layout of Princeton in order to reinforce the more intimate community he planned. He wanted the new graduate school to be moved to the middle of the campus, so that the graduate students and undergraduates would talk with one another. This would bring those engaged in pre-professional training, the experts of the near future, into regular and friendly contact with the leading citizens of the near future. Wilson also envisioned the English “quad” system of arranging the buildings, with dormitories facing one another across small courtyards not unlike town squares—again, for ease of striking up acquaintances and talking. The academic equivalent of Jefferson’s ward republic hereby enters the service of education for leadership of and in the administrative state.
Finally and most ambitiously, Wilson tried to break up the eating clubs that dominated many Princeton students’ social lives. The clubs operated rather like tonier versions of fraternizes; Wilson complained that they were “splitting classes into faction, and endangering that class spirit upon which we depend for our self-government and for the transmission of most of the loyal impulses of the University.” Christian Hegelianism demands synthesis, organic union not faction, centralization. Quad Associations would replace these clubs, Wilson hoped, eliminating their self-selecting and therefore snobbish character. “Democracy is made up of unchosen experiences”; its “contacts are unselected contacts, brought about in the course of duty and intimate cooperation with one’s fellow men, not in the course of taste and social selection.” Members of each Quad Association, including a resident university teacher and students from all four undergraduate classes, would eat and lodge together, “regulat[ing] their own corporate life by some simple method of self-government” to be run by the junior- and senior-class students. (“Grown men should govern themselves, in college or out.”) “We are not seeking to form better clubs” in the social sense of the word, but “academic communities” integrating college study with the residential life of the college. “We are making a university, not devising a method of social pleasure”; artificial social-class distinctions will be replaced by “natural association” “formed and dominated by the natural powers and aptitudes” of its members, offering “the finest possible opportunity for the development of self-government.” Wilson’s plan would have made all aspects of student life “absolutely controlled, not negatively, but constructively and administratively, by the university authorities,” beginning with the resident teachers in each quad. Each aspect of this structure reflects his conception of self-government as a feature of Christian personalism within an overarching university regime dedicated to the Progressive project.
The Christian Progressives of the new leadership class would be professionals, “a race of men schooled and grounded in youth in such learning as opens the mind to a just apprehension of the great questions of statecraft and drilled throughout manhood in the practice-school of national legislation and politics.” Formal and practical training alike would form society-uniting experts in the relations of things instead of class-warring experts in perpetual ‘critique.’
In Wilson’s own academic specialty, political science, Progressivism would be served by advancing the study of what Wilson’s generation had begun to call comparative politics. Political scientists had always compared and contrasted political regimes, as even a glance at Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Politics will reveal. But Wilson and other Progressive political scientists reconceived the field. As the author of The State, probably the first American textbook of the new comparative politics, Wilson wanted students and practitioners of politics to break out of America’s “too narrow” political life featuring “politicians to egotistically content with learning only from themselves.” Modern American leaders should avail themselves of “the general bank and capital of nations.” “I believe that our own institutions can be understood and appreciated only by those who know other systems of government as well, and the main facts of general institutional history.” The purpose of this study will be to enable students to import non-American governmental institutions; Europeans, after all, had more experience in designing bureaucracies than Americans had, given the control of state administrative appointments by political parties in America.
Not all comparative exercises are equally fruitful, however. English books especially maintain our advantage “of being hard-headed Saxons,” whose literature “is so full of action and of thoughts fit for action.” In his books and classroom teaching, Wilson formulated a newer science of politics to replace the “new science of politics” practiced by that earlier Princeton man, James Madison. Wilson intended to ‘de-center’ American political science away from American models, with particular emphasis on such English political scientists as Walter Bagehot and James Bryce, influenced by German political philosophy as Wilson himself had been. American political science must reverse the preference of Noah Webster for American things, leading its students beyond America as conceived by the American Founders and the statesmen who followed in their line, even as parents lead children outside the household.
Hegelian idealism differs from Platonic idealism because Hegel claims that ideas achieve full embodiment whereas in the Platonic dialogues the ideas insofar as they can be seen in human societies (‘justice,’ for example) remain at most standards for human conduct, never to be fully realized in an actual political community. To put the matter in terms of theology, the Holy Spirit of the Bible differs from the Absolute Spirit of Hegel because holiness presupposes separation whereas the Absolute Spirit is immanent in all physical things. As human beings learn to master those physical things, those things become more ‘spiritualized,’ more perfected, by the dialectical process of human thought aimed at such control. Following Hegel, the American Progressives aimed at realizable ideals. Wilson pursued those ideals outside the academy because mere bookishness eclipses individuality by holding it “too long in conjunction with other men’s thoughts; a little treading wisely done waketh a man up, but much reading ceaselessly done putteth him forever to sleep—’perchance to dream,’ but never to dream to any new purpose.” That would not be progressive. He left the professoriate for the executive life, first as president of Princeton, then as governor of New Jersey, finally as president of the United States, all in order to push forward the forces of historical dialectic he was sure were immanent within his own mind and will. His actual, physical body betrayed him, proving a weak reed just when his mind needed the body it inhabited.
In considering education in the United States today, the Christianity of the early Progressives has nearly disappeared. So has some of the confidence in reason, as ‘postmodernism’ undermined the new liberalism beginning in the late 1960s. Yet the techniques of postmodernism—deconstructionism, the attempt to analyze politics in terms of the sub-political categories of race, class, and gender, and similar moves—invariably and contradictorily find themselves at the service of a politics that continues to call itself progressive, nowhere more so than in the schools Dewey, Wilson, and their allies designed for that purpose more than a century past. And the professional classes, managers of ‘discourse’—whom Wilson called “opinion leaders”—remain confidently in place, ruling in tandem with the credentialed experts of the administrative state.
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