The American School:Education for a Democratic Culture: I
Walzer, Michael
With this issue DISSENT opens what we hope will be a sustained discussion on the problems of American education. The article by Michael Walzer is the first of a two part study; the second, a...
...even such a tutor as Rousseau offered to Emile—one teacher for one child—could never establish a sufficiently isolated environment in which to raise an entirely new man...
...The question, however, is not really of independence at all...
...This event 19th century educators set themselves, quite consciously, to avoid...
...this is a silence dictated by the widespread feeling that there is nothing to be said or done that can have any degree of certainty or conviction in it...
...Both are equally absurd and yet both have their point: these critiques of objective and authoritative or even traditional standards in culture and knowledge, whether originating in a false politics or a false psychology, serve to pave the way for the new "equality" of industrial society...
...This choice was once the hope and, what is more, the firm intention of men like ourselves: it was that class culture would be succeeded not by a bureaucratically sponsored but by a democratic culture...
...In the past, when culture and knowledge were the possessions of the ruling classes, authoritative and traditional values provided a defense of the status quo...
...he was infinitely educable, capable of learning anything if only it was emphatically enough scored upon the tablet of his mind...
...American schools have reflected, and that directly, the world of business, competition and acquisition...
...in fact he was to seize that role himself and, to a considerable extent, justify his characterization...
...This new universality is the immediate effect of industrialization...
...Quite aside from the philosophy of John Dewey, often, indeed, a distortion of his philosophy, this ideology requires examination...
...But what men learn by listening and watching only parallels and reinforces the discoveries of their limited literacy...
...Deprived of the insulation of class barriers and of the patronage of men who owed their cultivation, so to speak, to their social positions, these intellectuals will be responsible, as never before, to public authority...
...And in studying for mastery, the worker was educating himself against his class position, against his assigned place in the status quo...
...at any rate, it is not possible on such a scale as will guarantee a vital and significant intellectual life...
...For, whatever can be said of his teachers, he at least is a social being, the member of a family, of a gang, who watches television and goes to the movies...
...But neither Rembrandt's paintings, Racine's plays, nor Newton's science were offerings to democracy—nor it can be said that, available at last (they are available, at least in the technical sense, to literate men), they have become democracy's own...
...It is hardly possible to train free men without allowing them to experience these antagonisms...
...Through these machines, men are admitted to the world of limited equality, of rough cultural uniformity...
...He is bold enough to suggest that the "mass man" of the modern world, if he is ever to be just man again, requires the same knowledge as did the aristocrat or the capitalist...
...In the 18th century the new truth was psychological: through its critique of innate ideas and its thorough-going environmentalism, psychology "unveiled" Christianity, justified a faith in progress and set the task of the revolution...
...It was not neccessary, however, to go so far...
...The intellectual will fashion a specialization, cutting himself off from men in other fields...
...Society could be transformed only by objective knowl edge...
...Without establishing classlessness, industrialization has brought a considerable sharing in a new culture, commercially produced for a mass of consumers...
...In revolution we can discover one of the significant moments in the history of education...
...This is probably the most immediate critique which can be leveled against Dewey's vision: its essential component does not exist...
...Education, like any other benefit which society can offer, must first be sought, must be demanded...
...For the sake of man it might be required that the entire empirical world be re-arranged...
...More likely, our interest has its roots in that same educational "crisis" which is proclaimed by men whose goals are so very different from our own...
...Except occasionally, it was not even necessary to teach them obedience: only rarely did their horizon take dissent or rebellion into view...
...The article by Melvin Tumin is a shortened version of a talk he gave at a recent DISSENT forum in New York City...
...It is not, however, the product of the rise—far less of the revolt —of the masses...
...Not recognizing this, educational reformers have set themselves only indecisively against class society...
...If this world did not arrive, however, the schools would slowly but helplessly come to reflect whatever actually was the main drift...
...Precisely these standards have sometimes been called into doubt in the name of progressive education...
...By creating in the school an ideal environment, these men have suggested, it would be possible to create an ideal child...
...The founding of schools, colleges and lectureships by the English Puritans, the creation of a national educational system by Jacobin decree, the early Bolshevik experiments with progressive teaching methods and the campaign against illiteracy: these were regarded as major steps along the path to utopia...
...Without destroying the power of class position, it has led, through the sheer overwhelming production of cultural commodities, to a gradual homogenization of the mind...
...To a significant degree, the progress of democratic education can be linked to the aggressive social climbing, to the radical aspiration for status, material gain and public responsibility which always characterizes the members of a rising class...
...one can foresee the end of their control of both property and culture...
...That was an attack—it should be remembered—which could only have been made on the basis of adult consciousness...
...To teach the worker economics, mathematics or history was not to adjust him to his job...
...On the one hand, men continue to be trained for class roles...
...to this transforming process education has responded, and far more to this than to radical aspiration or reforming humanitarianism...
...The facts of social organization repeatedly break through the formal structure of the democratic school...
...His education was to be adjusted to his natural growth, assimilated to his natural experiences, indeed, even to his play...
...For in educating a child who is only a neutral being, as yet nothing, a blank abstraction, it is possible at least theoretically to do anything with him...
...They have tended, that is, to accede to the main drift...
...It is the historical development of industrialization which requires and to a significant degree produces that limited literacy which is characteristic of modern society...
...All this was a good thing easily carried too far...
...Education was thus a key to progress, to cultural advance, and the control of the child a key to the creation of a new world...
...To insist upon objective values today is to become a social critic...
...The schools, of course, have other tasks, though their most basic tasks are related to this one...
...In each of the great revolutions utopia was sought by teaching man his potential role in a newly discovered universe, by relating him in a radically new way to God, Nature or History...
...France, a Republic of Virtue...
...The student is thus saved any contact at all with the strange, the disagreeable, the incongruous...
...In each, consciousness, as Lenin once wrote, was half (or more) of salvation...
...Even this is a literacy which comes too late, for new inventions in mass communications have probably made the written word politically and culturally irrelevant to the mass of men...
...It has nothing to do with the adjustment of knowledge or culture to the supposed or anticipated needs or interests of the mass of men, or of society...
...from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, the empirical world must be arranged so that in it man experiences and gets used to what is really human " Thus Marx summed up the teachings of French sensationalist psychology and drew his own conclusion...
...They did not share that practical knowledge which brings power nor that other knowledge which brings good form...
...second, to provide at least a sense that alternatives exist to the mass culture produced outside the school, to inculcate a resistance to the easy and superficial enjoyments which are offered to masses of men in lieu, as it were, of the activity and involvement which democracy once promised...
...This is a problem in the definition of culture, in its standards and its content, and environmentalist theory appears to offer no key...
...Catholic monks might in fact educate future Jacobins, but not intentionally, not ac cording to plan...
...It is not a world created by the men who endure it...
...Believing that they were watching a noble drift toward a collectivist and a cooperative society, many educators sought to reflect such a society in their schools, to train the child for the "new world now coming into being," and thus to assist at its arrival...
...it is precisely the child who carries society into the school...
...In the name of one or another of the great social classes, "all England" was to be made a "land of the saints...
...Literacy and equality, in the mutilated forms we know them today, are things that happen to people...
...that is its nature...
...To make the school child-centered, it has been argued, is to alter somewhat the total reliance of the school upon society...
...If man is "open" enough, he is subject to extreme control: its extent is only a matter of the limitations of technique...
...Universal knowledge could only produce rebels against the particular conditions of class society...
...Taxes and war were for them natural events, not subject to their human control, submitted to, fled from, and provided against...
...The child, however, had by no means freed himself...
...The immediate responsibility for cultural democracy falls upon education...
...He only required to be placed in charge of a generation of children...
...nificant and perennial optimism among educators...
...But if that class was not merely to be replaced—and, whatever the result, that was never the intention—the knowledge of the revolutionary intellectual had to be shared...
...The product of the often painful labor of men of intellect and sensibility, recruited from all social classes, culture has been very much the "possession" of the ruling classes...
...The result of this will probably be a growing tendency to institutionalize the arts and sciences and to support them in some public fashion...
...Despite its possession of the culture, there has never been a ruling class which succeeded in patronizing art and science so effectively as to make them permanent allies of its government...
...Philosophers and saints, bourgeois intellectuals and, more recently, the men of the proletarian vanguard: all have proclaimed the stupidity of the established order and mocked the pretensions of the ruling class...
...But their work can hardly be called successful...
...Its vague humanitarianism has failed to link those techniques to a definite cultural purpose...
...any effort made within its walls must also be made outside them...
...In the West, of course, environmentalists have been far from totalitarians...
...The schools would justify themselves by proving to both Alger and his patrons that they possessed a cash value...
...in the literary societies and masonic lodges of the 18th century bourgeoisie...
...Revolutionary doctrines were usually historical, relativistic, corrosive of established ideas and artistic standards...
...To impose a common schooling would undoubtedly be to weaken such instincts...
...Art and science must then justify themselves before their new patrons, no longer by claiming to enhance the lives of a relatively small group, but by claiming to serve the needs and to increase the powers of government and industry...
...The ideas of the masses are essentially the ideas of these men, sponsored by them, perpetrated, as it were, by them—and not escaped by their perpetrators...
...First of all—and it is an odd charge to make—the environmentalist most often raised his school in a vacuum...
...The most significant elements of this character have been the attack upon "aristocratic education," the championship of vocational training, the demand for a harmonious relationship between the school and the new I17 industrial society...
...these events have had, in fact, products of considerably greater value, both culturally and politically...
...In vocational training and in business education, society's division of labor is actually reproduced within the school...
...First, it was a substantial body of knowledge that was required of thousands and hundreds of thousands of men...
...perhaps because we have inherited a grand optimism as to the possibilities of education...
...to humanize it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and the learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light.—Matthew Arnold The ownership of the old ruling classes is not a thing of permanence...
...The denunciation of bourgeois art and literature which frequently accompanied the romantic view of the worker was paralleled here in the renunciation of adult authority...
...It is a debate in which we must take part and the two essays which follow—the first historical and ideological, the second factual and descriptive (in the next issue)—represent, hopefully, only the beginning of a discussion in DISSENT...
...It has, first of all, its better half, and this is closely related to one of the most beneficent effects of industrialization: the freeing of the child from labor...
...Radicalism was the product of actual social conflict, of the vigorous self-assertion of rising classes, of rapid change, but not of social manipulation and certainly not of schooling...
...All this is democracy's inheritance from class society—along with the "culture of the ages...
...As it cannot passively reflect the transient concerns and values of society, so it cannot simply set the child "free...
...The importance of such independent activity, based on class initiative, must not be underestimated...
...Democracy in education, the radical argues, consists in the stubborn, persistent effort to make knowledge and culture, or at least the access to them, as universal as possible...
...IV "However successful organized labor has been in many ways," wrote an American educator in 1914, "it has never succeeded in directing the education of its children...
...They would be equally unable to resist political pressure...
...here there must be continual experiment...
...Russia, a communist society...
...It is not culture itself that is shared among its students, but only a particular social incarnation of culture, a tethered spirit, a philistine form...
...Capital still prepares the school books and practically controls the school systems of the world...
...The school was itself the only environment that the environmentalist understood...
...beyond the confines of that position lies a world of superstition and simple ignorance...
...Deprived of any sense of an objective body of knowledge defining their activity, the schools are unable to resist the insistent pressure of kitsch...
...And that is a position which radicals and conservatives sometimes uneasily share...
...To submit happily, then, he must create another myth: that the existing world is, or is becoming, a sufficient world for man...
...This training is supple...
...For a selected few, it might thus become an avenue of upwards mobility—but only for a few...
...And if they make such discoveries, they must share them...
...No less than the workers, the men of "idleness and exercised wit" had sacrificed a part of their human person to the division of labor...
...Precisely because of this flexibility, educators in a totalitarian society require just such a blankness as the philosophes, content with simpler visions, invented...
...he may turn it into a commodity to serve the purposes of destruction or consumption...
...Perhaps the key to the ideological nature of Progressive Education was its persistent emphasis on harmony...
...For him, education was a social force without a concretely recognized surrounding society...
...Has ever a so ciety, they asked, willingly established anything else...
...New methods of teaching may be necessary to educate victims of centuries of inequality, or to reach students of greater and lesser mental capacities...
...by insisting on the harmony of school and society, they would have prevented his ever being a revolutionary...
...But the treatment of the worker had its obvious historical rationale: he was to be admitted for the first time in history to an equal role in political society...
...Or, to put the matter less emphatically, the school will always be impinged upon by society...
...The knowledge which revolutionists taught, and rising social classes learned, was directed toward social conflict...
...To fit education into the necessarily limited world of his experience is to limit systematically the broadening of that experience through adult guid ance...
...Surely it has been the great crime of class society that it has systematically limited the possibility for self-expression, for public activity, for socially relevant thought and creativity on the part of masses of men...
...To these aspirations, the intellectual lends the form and content of his new knowledge and enthusiasm...
...Stalinist psychologists have frequently denounced the Freudian notion of a more substantial and more devious personality existing on various levels of consciousness: "How can we use the Freudian conception of man for socialist construction...
...First, the schools must aim at reaching the underprivileged, and with the same "facts" which the privileged are taught...
...This is the spurious world of mass perception which seeks to replace both individual insight and common sense...
...Such an achievement could re-establish the independence of the intellectual and the integrity of culture itself...
...In a way we would not have imagined but a century ago, the modern machine has brought into our cities a more frightening version of what Marx once called the "idiocy" of the countryside...
...Because industrialization is an active, transforming process, it leads to the new schooling, it creates a "progressive" character...
...socially, the levels on which conflict is expressed may be raised...
...V The culture of modern society is not yet a universal culture...
...Might not this fragmented person be put together again in the schools...
...Yet none of this suggests a lack of intelligence, energy and ingenuity...
...It would thrust the intellectual into a new relationship with his audience, a relationship of solidarity and democratic give-and-take, and ultimately, one may hope, it would transform the audience into a band of participants...
...Such a sharing was made possible by the self-educating activity of a rising social class, a bourgeoisie or a proletariat...
...This third alternative obviously requires a significant amount of interest, intelligence, alertness—and also some sort of cultural activism —among large numbers of men...
...To "seize" the schools it would be necessary first to seize the state, but then education is transformed into "re-education," into "education from above": all independence is lost...
...First in the name of religion, later of revolution, they have painfully sought that knowledge which would make them public men, prospective saints or citizens...
...There was in enviromentalist theory an implicit equalitarianism: all children, that is, arrived equally blank, awaiting imprint...
...Almost inevitably, this implies conflict between school and home, and resistance, discouragement, even delinquency on the part of the child...
...They have been gentle reformers and their use of such tech niques as they possess has been limited by their essentially humanitarian purposes...
...The young must continually test themselves against the best and most authoritative values that age knows...
...In each of these cases two essential points are illustrated...
...The essential basis for this environmentalism is the idea that a child enters upon life with his mind and his person only a blank tablet upon which a skillful teacher might well sketch a masterpiece...
...The only difficulty is to identify concretely their successors...
...Against this curse multitudes have struggled for generations...
...The imposition, however, is in no sense automatic: it requires struggle, it produces conflict...
...The intellectual basis of power today is deliberate and controlled confusion, a refusal to recognize distinctions moral or intellectual, an acceptance of all theories and positions, a rejection of all theories and positions...
...today that same goal is sought through "life adjustment...
...Newly freed from drudgery, he was to be freed also from all the restrictions of Victorian patriarchal society and of its parallel, the authoritarian school...
...The explanation of both these statements must be sought in the nature of class society...
...in the study groups organized by socialist parties in the 19th century...
...It is as if the senses themselves are restrained and restricted by the machines that serve them...
...We cannot depend upon our children to act like human beings unless we first teach them how human beings ought to act...
...On the other hand, the school tends to reproduce with emphasis the common features of American life, to suggest an American mood, a harmony of interests, an ethic of individual advance...
...The purpose of learning is the reception, assimilation and judgment of these values...
...he had been the beneficiary (and the benefits were often great) of the adult attack upon Victorianism...
...it is so far an article of merchandise that it may be turned to pecuniary account...
...Finally, we must realize that inequality and cultural corruption have to be fought in every area of modern life and not only in the schools...
...We need a socially 'open' man who is easily collectivized and quickly and profoundly transformed in his behavior...
...And that means that the education of children is ultimately dependent upon the politics and morality of adults...
...it discovers no meaningful relationship between work and study or between science and technology...
...the second, a documented study dealing with concrete problems in the American schools, will appear in our next issue...
...An 18th century French writer boasted that he could raise a generation of Shakespeares, and if his theory was correct, it was not an idle boast...
...This is a "middle-brow" attack and its effect is to make it extremely difficult to oppose from within the school that commercial culture which develops outside...
...It would create an audi ence whose response would be one of shared concern, not based on the prestige value which culture always had for the upper classes nor on that crude utilitarian calculus which determines value for modern bu reaucrats...
...The perenially unexpected surrender of the school to the pressures of a utilitarian, acquisitive and philistine world has resulted in the appearance of a new "universality" on a far lower level, a distorted, but still a possible, substitute for Dewey's vision...
...he grows up in a world of likeness and nearness, and it is in this world that equality is translated into conformity...
...Consequently, educational reformers have tended easily to shift their emphasis from the improvement of society through the child to the improvement of the child in relation to society...
...Among students, the response to this confusion is most often simply silence...
...Today the "equality" of industrial society, a rough cultural and political uniformity, is the key to the authority of those men who still exercise authority...
...Nor is it necessary or inevitable that the machine be made a villain...
...Because the child was as yet nothing, he might become everything...
...Revolution would not be necessary (or not necessary again) and the path of evolution would run through the classroom...
...These men have at least one virtue: they have made education a question again...
...The choice of the intellectual of the immediate future may be briefly summarized: on the one hand, he may make his culture useful or entertaining...
...Whether or not the child is a tabula rasa, to treat him as if this is so is to establish a relationship inherently immoral, a relationship that is deeply manipulative...
...Further contributions on this topic are invited —though with the caution that, due to our space problem, they may have to be held for several issues.—EDITORS...
...it was a path which led from anywhere to utopia...
...To retreat from these responsibilities will be to retreat either out of public view, as Oppenheimer would have had the scientists do, or into public notoriety, as our "beatniks" have done...
...Instead, the new ideas of men who have shunned such patronage, the lonely thinker, the avant garde artist, have traditionally provided the ideological forces of revolution...
...The great men of culture are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas, of their time...
...Control—it is a hard lesson— to be successful must be total...
...It was a similar spirit which animated John Dewey's early demands for an "industrial education...
...In all these respects, Progressive Education has served as one of the key ideologies of modern industrialization...
...Ever since the appearance of the Diggers in 17th century England, socialists have insisted upon the dignity of human labor...
...let him escape them if he can: we can depend upon his ingenuity...
...But there is a further criticism and a further danger...
...It is not too much to say that education today must be judged by the degree to which it makes the third alternative a possibility...
...second, between knowledge and reality...
...And, indeed, the transition from the pseudo-collectivism of the thirties to the "togetherness" of the fifties is not a difficult one...
...It is still possible, how ever, to suggest a more interesting, a more valuable, a more profound alternative...
...That vulgarization is, of course, a fact: it is embodied daily in our popular press, movie theaters and television screens...
...The recent proposals to treat all education as vocational training, to insist that the knowledge of intellectual, worker, manager and businessman is nothing but "skill" in its various aspects, and thus to generate a feeling and an appearance of equality—these proposals would tend to destroy whatever still remains of our unified cultural heritage...
...As it developed, however, vocational training is, in its most essential features, alien to this goal...
...They insisted that the established educational sys tem could only be understood as a reflection of the existing order, a training ground for future stalwarts of the status quo...
...The very progress of educational reform in the 19th century, dependent as it was upon the support of capital, effectively fastened the values of capitalism upon the schools...
...IF THE ENVIRONMENTALIST were to recognize the actual world, however, he would have no choice but to submit—or to control it and shape others to submission...
...For education, wrote Horace Mann, a reformer capable of more noble pronouncements, "has a market value...
...For the child himself sets no standards...
...Because aristocrats and capitalists, French noblemen, Dutch burghers or English gentry, were also men, the greatest achievements of their civilization necessarily become mankind's...
...The intellectual history of all other men seems almost as if it were a curse...
...A single example will suffice...
...The second point is even more important...
...Kitsch can be resisted, but resistance is by no means the easiest path...
...The same purpose is served by the attack of the progressives not only on the "aristocrats" but on the content of their culture...
...Still, given the social meaning of the first alternative, the loneliness of the second may prove only a form of self-protection and its clowning, when that occurs, only a minor self-indulgence...
...Not, by any means, that all men will or ought to become intellectuals, but communication and, to a more limited degree, cooperation, must be made possible, and this not only for the sake of the enjoyment of art and literature, but also for the sake of political responsibility...
...Equality and conformity, culture and kitsch, political power and political powerlessness: these opposites are merged so that language itself seems deceitful...
...There is, however, another choice, which exists because responsibility to public authority is still, in the West at least, in part responsibility to the public...
...Both Marxism and the work of the philosophes offered significant and disciplined insights and both were rooted in a long tradition of intellectual endeavor...
...This was a matter not only of difficulty but of danger, and especially dangerous it was insofar as the knoweldge of philosophes and socialists laid claim to universality and absolute truth...
...Education becomes partial, particular, limited...
...To learn the things they taught was to deserve the inheritance the revolution promised...
...Whether such knowledge would be gained through experience, through actual social life, as Marx thought, or whether through the patient schooling of social-democracy, is less important than the fact that through radical aspiration men would come to know the truth about themselves and their society...
...It poses two dramatic challenges to democratic education: first, to provide a worthwhile substitute for the traditional training aimed at narrow and permanent class roles...
...Who will inherit the culture of the educated and the leisured classes...
...the men of culture are the true apostles of equality...
...In their critique of the reformers, the revolutionaries often proved the greater realists...
...The school of the environmentalist, his attractive but private moral world, was really a myth...
...Isolated and alone, subject to politics as he was to nature, superstitious and selfish: if this is a description of the life of the peasant (and it is a very partial one), he changed his condition but little when he came to the metropolis...
...If they should ever appear in a mob, capitalism itself might be endangered...
...By and large, the private sponsorship of cultural activity is already impossible...
...but the child was father to the man and the child's world far easier to control...
...Education involves an effort to direct development...
...More explicitly, it is the hope that the intellectual, instead of being progressively more isolated from all groups in society, will succeed in making contact with large numbers of men and women, outside of what remains of the upper classes and independent of the activities of government and commerce...
...That it might be controlled and the new man created artificially, as it were, in the midst of the old order: this hope has been the basis of a sig...
...in a democracy such an adjustment closes the circle against intellectual progress...
...in it he will discover a new responsibility and then a new bond...
...The radical, however, hopes that he can share his values more widely and make his objectivity the basis for equality in society...
...The most immediate attempt to meet these challenges is made in the course of the actual historical attack upon class society, in the course, that is, of revolution...
...At the same time as the schools seek to extend their reach, they must also defend that body of knowledge which they represent...
...but finally, struggle and discouragement are the immediate price we pay in order to confront class society with equality and cultural value...
...American "instrumentalism" in the 1930's was based upon such a myth...
...it was, in intention at least, to make him its master...
...But this is simply not true...
...Nevertheless, both in its unrecognized limitations and in its much-vaunted possibilities, there are dangers...
...Those who would "adjust" the child to society would also introduce kitsch into the schools...
...But this was hardly an equalitarianism capable of dealing with the children who actually arrived—already equipped with social senses, with a pathetic instinct for class lines...
...That basis can only be the standards which intelligent adults establish in culture and morality...
...For centuries the mass of men was trained only in submission, in minor sKills which made its members serviceable to those above them, They were seldom invited to admire in poetry or philosophy the wonder of the universe, nor to know men radically different from themselves...
...Bourgeois and worker, if educated in large enough numbers, would necessarily challenge the political power and cultural supremacy of the older ruling classes...
...The Algers must appear one at a time to storm the windmill of capitalist success...
...Labor, often imitating, if not sharing, the values of this world, has offered no consistent, urgent or vital alternative...
...Because they are passive in nature, these conditions co-exist with their historical opposites...
...Indeed, it is there already...
...These are but two forms of an educational process which meets neither of the challenges described in the first section...
...the second makes genuine creative effort impossible...
...The question is only: upon what basis...
...In the nineteenth century one of these goals was social pacification...
...The first of these aims at an old-fashioned independence and would probably achieve only isolation...
...Let the student struggle against them if he must...
...It produces no insight into the workings of industry and machinery...
...The romanticizing of the child came to parallel in a rather disturbing way the romanticizing of the worker: both are examples of that middle-class condescension which so oddly combines with selfhatred...
...The result has been that the cultural creations of these men (folk-cultures) have never assumed a stature capable of withstanding the uprooting and transforming pressures of modern industrialization or of resisting their own replacement by commercially produced cultural forms...
...DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION involves a two-fold opposition to the conditions of contemporary America, and this is an opposition which we would do well to recognize and admit...
...One form of this extraordinarily limited schooling deserves special examination: it is vocational training...
...It should be said also that only today is it a matter of possibility...
...VI It is necessary to talk of objectivity and of conflict: these two ideas provide at least the context within which a radical answer to the problems of education might be developed...
...So long as the voice of independent, aggressive, self-interested man is not heard, the schools will serve appointed social goals...
...For true education is fundamentally rooted in two natural and inevitable conflicts: first, between age and authority on the one hand, and youth and freedom on the other...
...it is equally true that there would be other factors, above all political ones, involved in the success of a democratic culture...
...If these men have claimed the privileges of their new knowledge, they have also obeyed its injunctions...
...Self-education begins outside the school: in the home of the English yeoman, with its one book the newly translated Bible...
...But the schools remain our present concern, perhaps because, in an age when politics is so difficult, the training of children appears as an easier path...
...Young socialists in England have written movingly of how a state-educated working class boy can "never go home again...
...It is a question not only of their ornaments and their entertainments, but of that whole range of knowledge and beauty which is the basis of creativity in the arts and also in science and politics...
...The education of the future," Marx wrote, "will in the case of every child over a certain age combine productive labor with education and athletics, not merely as one of the methods of raising social production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings...
...Because they were not yet—until democracy had made them so—public men, the education of the masses was for centuries apolitical...
...And so they failed also to recognize the contacts which the world imposed...
...who have labored to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive...
...it may be minted and will yield a larger amount of statutable coin than common bullion...
...It is only in the sense of this replacement that there has occurred that vulgarization of art and thought which reactionary writers attribute to the masses themselves...
...He may rebel against it—or its creators —but that rebellion at least would be his own, and its effect upon the inherited body of learning and culture would not be destruction, but preservation and invigoration...
...In each case the educating or the self-educating of the masses was a major element in revolutionary activity...
...Its tradition, in so far as it has survived, has emphasized rather the techniques of education than its content...
...But the commitment of the adult, of the teacher, if it is honest, ought to be made clear...
...Instead of the young citizen being trained in that universal knowledge which would make possible his active participation in a democratic politics and culture, he is trained only in those particular skills which make him a worker, a middle class man, etc...
...And for this, there are possibilities which lie not in the control of the schools, but rather in the control of their subject matter...
...The point is that the environmentalist is driven either to ignore the society that surrounds the school, to create a purely local environment—which is probably impossible and at any rate ineffective —or to admit society into the school—which, and we shall argue this point below, is pernicious...
...The reception of humane culture in modern democratic society, the appropriation by all men of their own historical achievement, this is today a matter of uncertainty...
...This effort, again necessarily, will bring them into conflict with the commercialized vulgarity of American culture...
...In the 19th century the new truth was contained in Marxist economics and history with their critique both of the "iron laws" of capitalism and of the capitalist's claim to permanence...
...Ignorance, Marx told the "spontaneous" revolutionary Weitling, will never make a revolution...
...America is today debating its educational problems...
...Once again the existing world was "unveiled" and possibilities for improvement, for transformation suggested...
...And if they have possessed it, they have also protected it, given it a broad scope limited only by their interests and their security, and provided the social medium of cultural exchange...
...It is possible only if teachers insist upon the integrity of their subjects, only if they discover within their history, English or physics standards of excellence and value...
...On the other hand, he may practice a form of intellectual purism which in the modern world might be counted upon to yield both the recluse and the clown...
...I11 "If man draws all his knowledge, sensations, etc...
...it is one of selective resistance...
...This is not an attack of the avant-garde, for no new content of equal or superior value is offered...
...Learning became, like virtually everything else, an acquisitive process, directed toward the future accumulation of commodities...
...These can be alleviated by an intelligent and sympathetic teacher...
...it is only with such experience that freedom becomes self-conscious...
...The rest, as Dewey wrote, would carry away from the schools little more than "a narrowly practical tool with which to get bread and butter enough to eke out a restricted life...
...The vulgarization of culture represents rather the articulation from above and the mass exploitation of a centuries-old ignorance, an eternal craving for excitement, a taste for sex and scandal coarsened and heightened as it is more or less deliberately fed...
...The second danger of environmentalist theory is contained in the very possibilities it suggests...
...There is about all this a certain graceless naivete and optimism which is not unattractive...
...Today it may safely be said that a democratic culture is the necessary precondition for a democratic politics...
...It has been mani fest in the work of French philosophes, of revolutionary Russians, of American "instrumentalists...
...This was an effort to achieve a new universality to replace that of "aristocratic education," a new unity in the school oriented to the democratic and cooperative society supposedly emerging outside...
...success can only be limited...
...They would not so much end invidious distinctions, which are still enforced by society, but all distinction whatsoever, and something of that ought to be upheld by the school...
...mented by a more general education not in politics but in patriotism, not in culture but in kitsch...
...He can, perhaps, be made a Shakespeare...
...as easily, and with more likelihood, he can be shaped into a junior executive...
...Control it he probably cannot...
...It provides only a narrow training in special skills, and since even this is not a shared learning, it yields no new social unity, but instead introduces into the school the invidious distinctions which prevail in a class society...
...In class society men learn primarily what they need to know and their needs tend to be limited by their class position...
...If man was shaped by his environment, then his environment must be made human...
...Idle curiosity has been the privilege of those who have idle moments— and for them it is often only an enhancement of prestige...
...To shape a truly independent educational environment is not possible...
...The school can no more rely upon its students for its standards than it can upon its environment...
...Beyond this nothing was necessary but an acceptance of restriction, of human limitation, by the masses of men who would have to endure it...
...The point, however, is not to educate a handful of outcasts— though even that may prove a necessary beginning—but to reach a whole class...
...But the thrust of modern industrialism—more especially, of cultural mass production—has overwhelmed this slow process of selfeducation and it has broken apart the communities in which it was possible...
...As they did not (willingly) share their wealth, so the ruling classes did not share their education...
...Whereas the revolutionaries had recognized that between themselves and the surrounding world there could only be conflict, the environmentalists were reformers who tended to feel that they could improve the world without coming into contact with it...
...It has served only to emphasize the ambiguous position which the school occupies in relation to society as a whole...
...Whether overtly revolutionary or not, it is difficult to see how a truly democratic education can have different results—unless the knowledge which is taught ceases to be universal, becomes instead partial, incomplete, relativistic, adjusted to the presumed needs of different men...
...But the ideas with which all must wrestle, in one form or another, are the same...
...By insisting on the harmony of school and student, the progressives would have prevented the child from ever being a rebel...
...These ideas are utterly dependent upon the denial, even the destruction of value...
...The movement organized in Dewey's name restored a certain radical elan to education by assimilating the child to the category of oppressed classes...
...The effort to break down class lines through free education was quite seriously meant, but this was an effort aimed rather at some occasional Horatio Alger than at the working class as a whole...
...If the new men in the realm of property are to be managers and bureaucrats, then it is at least possible that the new men of culture will be members of an increasingly narrow group of professional intellectuals: academicians and servants of the giant foundations...
Vol. 6 • April 1959 • No. 2
