Revolution in Education

Citation preview

J.

ADLER

ancl M I L T O N

M AY E R

MORTIMER

The Revolution in Education JVith an Introduction by Clarence Faust

(i)

THE

U

IVERSITY

OF

CHICAGO

PRE

S

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 58-5534 THE

U IVERSITY

OF

CHICAGO

PRESS,

CHICAGO

37

Cambridge University Press, London, N.W. 1, England The University of Toronto Press, Toronto 5, Canada

© 1958

by The University of Chicago. Published 1958 Third Impression 1959. Composed and printed by THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

Preface

This book attempts to locate the major differences in theory and principle which underlie the current acute controversies about American education-about its purposes, its institutional arrangements, and its methods. It does not, its authors point out, seek "to find the right answers; it is trying to find the right questions." It assumes that the clarification of the basic issues in current educational controversy might not only clear the air but open the way to more fruitful discussion of the alternatives open to American education in the twentieth century. Certainly, in much of current controversy about education opposing parties never really join issue. Each party describes the positions of its V

vi Preface

opponents in terms its opponents refuse to accept, and each vie,vs the criticism of its opponents as merely the demolition of stra,v structures. vVhether ~1r. Adler and l\tir. l\tiayer's analysis of the issues in the present debates about education goes to the heart of the matter each reader ,vill of course judge for himself. The book ,vill have served its purpose if he either finds the analysis illuminating or is led to attempt another formulation ,vhich identifies the vie,vs of opposing parties in ,vays both ,vould accept as doing justice to their positions. The book is an outgro,vth of material prepared for a seminar session several years ago of the members of the boards of the Fund for Adult Education and the Fund for the Advancement of Education. The method it employs has been and is being applied to other critical problems, such as the idea of freedom, by the Institute for Philosophical Research, of ,vhich Mr. Adler is director. The interest these days among educators and laymen alike in the questions of policy and practice in American education, which has mounted so rapidly in recent years that educational controversy has become front-page ne,vs, must be encouraging to all ,vho believe in the critical importance of education to the ,vay and quality of American life. This book seeks to find a ,vay of inducing, in the ,videspread controversies ,vhich are already ,vell under ,vay and bound to beco1ne n1ore insistent, at least as much light as heat. CLARENCE FAUST

Contents

Part I.

THE FE,v BECOME THE 1\1ANY

3

I. American Revolution, 1850-1950

14

2. Ancient Questions-and Answers

26

3. Modern Questions

Part II.

THE LINES OF REASONING

37

4. What ls Education?

43

5. The American Focus

47

6. Bill of Particulars

55

7. Principle, Policy, and Practice

..

Vtt

vtti

Contents

Part I II.

THE ISSUES

67

8. No Uncertain Terms

71

9. The Aristocrat and the Democrat

79

10. The Realist and the Idealist

95

11. The Traditionalist and the Modernist

Part IV.

THE ISSUES IN ACTION

109

12. The School System

116

13. Learning Begins at Forty

134

14. The Learning of Teachers

Part V.

UNDER TEATH THE 1ssuEs: THE AGE OF SCIENCE

145

15. Trouble in Utopia

152

16. The Appearance of Agreement

157

17. The Modernist Position

163

18. The Traditionalist Position

174

19. The Educational Consequences

Part VI.

ROADS To RESOLUTION

185

20. Stripping for Action

190

21. Fact and Principle: A Recapitulation

199

ACKNOvVLEDGMENT

203

BIBLIOGRAPHY

219

INDEX

PART

I

The Few Become the Many

CHAPTER

I

American Revolution, 1850-1950

The mass of our citizens may be divided into two classes-the laboring and the learned .... At the discharging of the pupils from the elementary schools ( after three years of schooling) the two classes separate-those destined for labor will engage in the business of agriculture, or enter into apprenticeship to such handicraft art as may be their choice; their companions, destined to the pursuits of science, will proceed to the College.

These words are among the most revolutionary ever written. They proposed-in the year 1814-that every American child go to school. For only three years, to be sure; but in 1814 the proposal \vas revolutionary, not only in America, but everywhere in the world. The words were written by an old hand at revolutionary documents, Thomas Jefferson. They appear in a letter to his 3

4

The Revolution in Education

nephe,v, Peter Carr, a letter outlining Jefferson's projected "Bill for Establishing a System of Public Education." And it may be debated ,vhich of the nvo docun1ents-this one or the Declaration of Independence, inscribed by the same hand-,vas the more revolutionary. Ne,~er before in the history of the ,vorld had a great statesman proposed universal free education. Less influential men had n1ade the proposal in ages past. The Czech philosopher Comenius ,vrote in his The Great Didactic in 1632: "All ,vho are born to man's estate have need of instruction, since it is necessary that, being men, they should not be ,vild beasts, savage brutes, or inert logs. And since all have been born ,vith the same end in vie,v, namely that they should be men, it f ollo,vs that all boys and girls, both noble and ignoble, rich and poor, in all cities and to,vns, villages and han1lets, should be sent to school." Jefferson, too, ,vas only a private citizen ,vhen he vvrote Peter Carr; but he ,vas the First Citizen of the land, and he had fought for education in season and out. In 1813 he ren1inded John Adams of his earliest effort a generation before: . . . At the first session of our [Virginia] legislature after the Declaration of Independence, we passed a law abolishing entails ... [and another] abolishing the privilege of primogeniture .... These laws, dra,vn by myself, laid the ax to the foot of pseudo-aristocracy. And had another which I prepared been adopted by the legislature, our ,vork would have been complete. It ,vas a bill for the more general diffusion of learning. This proposed to divide every county into wards ... ; to establish in each ,vard a free school for reading, ,vriting and common arithmetic; to provide for the annual selection of the best subjects f ro1n these schools, ·who might receive, at the public expense, a higher degree of education at a district school; and from these district schools to select a certain nurnber of the most promising subjects, to be completed at an University, ,vhere all the useful sciences should be taught. vVorth and genius ,vould thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and con1pletely prepared by education for defeating the competition of ,vealth and birth for public trusts .... Although this la,v has not yet been acted on [more

American Revolution, 1850-1950

J

than thirty-five years later], I have great hope that some patriotic spirit ,vill, at a favorable n101nent, call it up, and make it the keystone of the arch of our government.

As ,ve read these ,vords today, they are tame-indeed, "reactionary"-so far has Jefferson's revolution in education proceeded. They did not conten1platc the schooling of girls or of the children of slaves; they restricted universal schooling to the n1ost clcn1cntary level; they did not involve co1npulsory attendance. Con1pulsory instruction in reading and religion had existed for a century in Calvinist Ne,v England-the first compulsory education in the English-speaking ,vorld-but it had passed ,vith the passing of to,vnship theocracy. Jefferson hin1self opposed con1pulsion, asserting in connection ,vith his Bill for Public Education that "it is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the con1mon f eclings and ideas by the forcible asportation and education of the infant against the ,vill of the father." The first state to adopt con1pulsory education at public expense ,vas l\lassachusetts in 1852, and Jefferson's o,vn Virginia did not require attendance until 1908. The proposal of f rec elcrncntary schooling for all ( even on a voluntary basis) ,vas the beginning of the democratic revolution in education, a revolution no,v n1atured in our own and most other \Vcstcrn countries. Contemporaneously ,vith Jefferson, Pcstalozzi in S,vitzerland had been urging the free education of the poor, and compulsory schooling on a fee basis ,vas on the statute books (if sporadic in practice) in both Scotland and Prussia. The den1and for f rec public education for all children ,vas as revolutionary in n1id-nineteenth-century Europe as it had been in America a century earlier; it was n1adc by l\1arx and Engels in the Connnunist lvianif esto in 1848, "to ,vin the battle of dcn1ocracy." Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the United States Constitution mentioned education. The nation's first

6

The Revolution in Education

statement of public policy on the subject was made in the North,vest Ordinance, enacted in 1787: "Religion, morality, and kno,vledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of n1ankind, schools and the means of education shall ever be encouraged." The Ordinance provided that one thirtysixth of each to,vnship in the ne,v territory be set aside for the n1aintenance of schools. But it ,vas a long ,vay from the encourage11zent of public education to its requirenzent. The ,vay ,vas long because the United States of Jefferson's time ,vas neither a political democracy nor an economic democracy, as indicated in Jefferson's distinction benveen "those ,vho are destined for labor and those ,vho are destined for learning and leisure." America had rebelled against England in 1776, but the revolution ,vithin America did not begin until later. The An1erican republic of the eighteenth century resembled the Greek republics of the time of Plato in nvo fundan1ental respects: economically it ,vas non-industrial, and politi. cally it restricted citizenship. So-as in all the past centuries of vVestern history-education ,vas for the fe,v leisured men, destined for the life of learning or for public or private professions or the heights of trade and commerce. It ,vas not for the n1any ,vho labored, ,vho ,vere destined for a life of toil in a society moved not by machines but by human muscle. The very difficulty of comprehending this concept no,vadays indicates ho,v radical the American revolution of 1850-1950 has been. The ,vord "school" derives from the Greek ,vord for leisure,