Robert Hutchins Rides Again

...It is Mr...

...The common curriculum of studies that seems most relevant for a democracy would look quite different from that proposed by Mr...

...If we were to derive our educational aims from these differentiae, we would have to say that man's education must primarily be vocational or technological or that it must develop his power to crack jokes...

...And it is something else again to assert that the content of a common education must be unchanging and identical in every respect...

...The third, and most important, concerns the claim that to deny the adequacy of Mr...

...He explains this with marvelous aplomb: Aristotle simply did not understand his own doctrines...

...To be a ruler himself or to elect his rulers, he needs the education which has been universally regarded, except by those who differ with Mr...

...there are also the qualities it has in common with other species in its genus...

...We might even concede that the formal requirements of a well-balanced diet necessary for health are the same for all men...

...Hutchins assures us is best achieved by what he regards as the best education...

...Hutchins excludes...

...Hutchins's curricular means involves a denial of the democratic philosophy itself...

...Hutchins and other critics of modern education scorn as serious tomfoolery...

...Hutchins's belief that American professors and teachers are completely intimidated is bound up in his own mind with their refusal to accept his educational theories--so clear, so apparently compelling, and so unqualified in their claims...

...This best education is the education which, by prescribed studies in mathematics, languages, philosophy and science, develops the intellectual powers of man...

...But there is no reason to believe that what was the best education for the undemocratic rulers of the past--if it was the best--is now the best education for the masses...

...Hutchins slides much too easily over the fact that the best education recommended by him for the preservation of democracy was, in the past, close to the kind of education found in undemocratic societies...

...According to this argument, since every man in a democracy is a voter, he is a ruler...

...It nurtured an elite which, on the whole, opposed democracy wherever it appeared...

...It makes great play with deduction from axiomatic first principles and purports to derive a desirable educational program from metaphysical premises...

...Hutchins deplores) is, indeed, partly the result of extreme, unqualified language about subversion, foreign policy and Communism...

...The present climate of opinion (which, together with the rest of us, Mr...

...This would seem to suggest a conspicuous kind of irrelevance between the intellectual skills in language, mathematics and science (however desirable these skills may be for enlarging our understanding of the world) and the political wisdom and maturity about human affairs which Mr...

...Nor do I see why it is necessary to divorce it from the study of organized subject-matters and basic skills...

...Man is the only animal with a sense of humor...

...What it means to be healthy (i.e., the definition of health) is the same for all men...

...On the other hand, the trade unions and the dissenting churches were the schools of democracy in Europe--not the Gymnasium, the lycee or the university...

...therefore, education must be directed exclusively to the cultivation of his intellect...

...Hutchins calls intellectual power...

...Hutchins believes that, by flattering the masses with assurances that they can all profit by his prescribed educational curriculum, his proposals will become more acceptable to them...

...Hutchins who is inconsistent here...

...Although in recent years Sidney Hook has been best known as a political commentator, he has long been influential as an educator...

...But it is not necessary to be an expert to judge the basic policies proposed by experts...

...David J. Dallin and Boris Souvarine are among the writers who will discuss the free world's prospects at Geneva...

...How to do this best cannot be derived from definitions, but must be discovered by inquiry and experiment, which may not give us absolute or certain truth for all time but sufficiently reliable knowledge for our time...

...Hutchins has deduced for them, that would not be decisive, because they might be able to profit even more from the study of a better one and one more relevant to our times...

...What is paradoxical, to put it mildly, about this argument is that Mr...

...I have italicized entire and everywhere because they convey the flavor of Mr...

...Therefore, education everywhere at all times and for all men (and women) must be the same...

...Hutchins's thought whatever the subject of his discourse...

...It is frankly and proudly non-empirical...

...An education appropriate to the nature of man must be appropriate to the whole of man's nature...

...As modern educators use the term "intelligence," it is broader than the exercise of special intellectual aptitudes...

...Hutchins takes as his models, regarded as the end of education not exclusively intellectual development, but the harmonious development of all human faculties...

...An analogy might make the point clearer...

...He did so in the pages of The New Leader a decade ago...

...First, even if we deny that other animals can think (and not all psychologists agree with this), the power to think is not the only differentiating feature of the human animal...

...I am not suggesting that the formation of attitudes which enter into moral character should be the task only of the school, or that it should be the whole task of the school or even the direct task of the school except on the elementary level...

...The use of extreme, unqualified language is almost always a sign of the failure to make proper discriminations...

...What Mr...

...Modern education, to the extent that it is inspired by Dewey, interprets it broadly as creative intelligence in the solution of problems which arise in all fields of human experience...

...Hutchins's conception of an education appropriate for free men and at the same time believe in democracy...

...There are several things wrong with the deduction...

...If there are differences among them, if they live in different climates and must perform different tasks, to prescribe a common dietary regimen is to guarantee that not all of them will be healthy...

...It involves judgment of values concerning the relations of persons to persons and of persons to groups...

...This would include some things that Mr...

...Hutchins is a little embarrassed that Aristotle, whose works and ideas are pillars which support the best education, opposed democracy and held that some men by nature are slaves...

...Democracy in education is the belief that each person is entitled to the educational opportunities necessary to develop his potential capacities to their highest form...

...It has never been fully tried in the past, but the nearest thing to it is the curriculum of studies as it existed in the aristocratic cultures of the past, when few were rulers...

...If Mr...

...John's College "Great Books" experiment...

...He has therefore hit upon a novel defense of the kind of education he proposes...

...Hutchins's all-prescribed curriculum for all men and women, whose model, incidentally, is not so much the Chicago plan as the curriculum of St...

...John's plan...

...He has persuaded many public-spirited citizens that our entire educational system from kindergarten to university is a dismal failure, and that only his own philosophy can serve as a basis for its reconstruction...

...In effect, we are given an unqualified choice between agreeing with Mr...

...Hutchins or abandoning the democratic ideal...

...By Sidney Hook Robert Hutchins Rides Again In the name of democracy, his new book advocates the same old aristocratic theories of education which, in the past, have helped undermine democracy In a recent magazine article, Robert Hutchins returned to his charge that "the entire teaching profession of the United States is now intimidated...

...This is the common subject-matter of everybody's experience, from child to adult...

...He apparently believes that such criticisms are most effectively met by being ignored...

...That the central aim of education should be the development of man's power of thought is, so far as I know, denied by nobody--provided we do not identify power of thought with a specific intellectual skill...

...Without neglecting the basic skills and subject-matters, it would emphasize elements in the student's personal and social experiences which mirror larger relationships, carry this to higher levels of generalization and complexity, and orient liberal education to a consideration of the great social and political problems of our time on which we have to make decisions, instead of the social and political problems of past time...

...It is either true or false...

...Hutchins is attempting to settle on political grounds a fact which has nothing to do with politics...

...There is nothing inconsistent in believing that the citizens of a democracy are, on the whole, the best judges of their own true interests, and believing that the training appropriate for an intellectual or academic elite should not be made an educational requirement for all...

...The book restates familiar views but maintains much more explicitly than ever before that no intelligent or consistent person can disagree with Mr...

...It is quite another to say that all education in a democracy must be common...

...Hutchins has changed his tack...

...Everyone needs to be healthy...

...Modern education does not neglect it...

...Hutchins regards as best for them is neither "democratic" nor "undemocratic...

...Presumably, that is also why Plato and Aquinas, as important as Aristotle in this educational scheme, advocated the death sentence for heretics...

...The second concerns the curricular means by which these ends are to be achieved...

...Third, what do we mean by thought...

...Hutchins's own scheme of education has been developed in detail for liberal education on the college level...

...The most recent expression of Mr...

...This is the mistake of those who assume that, if their employes are slipshod in the use of tools, it is because they did not learn the niceties of Latin or English grammar...

...If there are any experts in the wisdom of life, they cannot be mass produced by the same education...

...But who will therefore deduce that all men must eat the same things at the same time (or exercise in the same way) in order to be healthy...

...and that, even in the same culture, variations among them are appreciable...

...Hutchins, as the best education...

...Hutchins is really saying is this: Either accept the rule of an elite or of intellectual experts and give up democracy, or admit that the masses are all intellectual experts in a democracy and educate them to be experts...

...But Mr...

...It therefore stresses the fact that their indisputable common need--the development of intelligence--may be achieved in different ways...

...I believe it can be established that, in order to be intelligent, men must be able to communicate with each other, understand the cultural past relevant to their present experience, and, in so doing, acquire certain basic skills and familiarity with certain subject-matters...

...Second, the nature of a thing is not completely explained by what differentiates it...

...Hutchins seems to identify thought or reason with academic intellectuality, with verbal skills in the interpretation of texts...

...Hutchins's writings are the source of many current strictures against modern education which assert that teachers are unable and unwilling to teach properly because they have been misled by the ideas of John Dewey, scientific psychology, and a false view of the nature of democracy...

...The first assumption concerns the ends of education and how they are derived...

...Apparently, Mr...

...One can choose his doctor wisely without a medical education...

...And he criticizes those who penned the report of the President's Commission on Education by saying: "They most undemocratically assume that the mass of people are incapable of achieving such an education...

...But it is precisely projects and activities of this kind which Mr...

...Unable to convince American educators of the validity of his position, Mr...

...It is as momentous as all that...

...Hutchins urges--that it must cease to concern itself with attitudes, emotions and social relations...

...But whereas most educators justify the emphasis on thought because of its key role in the organization of impulse and feeling, the control of action, and the enrichment of the meanings of experience even when we cannot act, Mr...

...Sometimes I think that Mr...

...This is a far cry, however, from Mr...

...It is one thing to say that a healthy democracy rests upon some kind of common education...

...Just as there are different dietary roads to health, so there are different curricular roads to educational maturity...

...Even if the masses were able to profit by the curriculum Mr...

...Hutchins derives it from a definition of man's fixed and essential nature: Man is a rational animal...

...I say "returned" because, almost four years ago, he broadcast the news to the world: "Everywhere in the United States, university professors, whether or not they have tenure, are silenced by the general atmosphere of repression that now prevails...

...Accused in the past of advocating an education irrelevant, if not hostile, to the needs of men in a democratic society...

...The Greeks, whom Mr...

...A biographer and associate of John Dewey, he is the author of Education for Modern Man and was among the first to criticize seriously the St...

...Hutchins has had more success with those who are not educators...

...NEXT WEEK: GENEVA The international conference opening in Geneva on April 26 will be the subject of several articles in next week's issue of The New Leader...

...The subject-matters of different fields are often so far removed from each other that the skills and habits acquired in mastering one field are no index to competence in another...

...Hutchins is very well aware of the diversity and variety of human talents...

...No matter how intelligence is defined or measured, there is an enormous variation in human abilities, particularly the ability to understand the great books of the past, a few of which are confessedly beyond the competence of some of the architects of the St...

...This deductive approach from fallible first principles is carried over into discussion of the curriculum of education...

...He is now contending that only those who agree with his conception of the best education can be considered consistent democrats...

...But, if they are to be intelligent in the modern world, their education must prepare them to cope with the problems of that world...

...This calls attention to a significant difference in what modern educators call intelligence and what Mr...

...If it does not educate for democracy well, the only legitimate criticism is that it must do it better, and not--as Mr...

...Hutchins does not attempt to meet criticisms of his views...

...For in addressing his appeal for the reform of education to the community, he admits that wise educational decisions may be made by those who are not educational experts or who have not been nurtured on the great books...

...that their differences in culture and time reflect themselves in the way their common needs are fulfilled...

...Man is the only animal who makes his tools...

...Here I wish only to analyze some of the leading assumptions behind his position...

...But the belief that not all students are capable of profiting by the kind of education that Mr...

...He should encourage the quest for curricular activities and projects which strengthen a behavior free from the twin faults of egomania and servility, which facilitate imaginative identification with others, which teach that an opponent is not necessarily an enemy and that democracy is also a personal way of life...

...If "education for democracy" is not a mere phrase, we cannot neglect it...

...To have "strong faith in the political judgment of the masses with strong doubts of their intellectual capacities" (i.e., of their intellectual capacities to acquire the best education) is a paradox, writes Mr...

...Great segments of these roads, of course, will be common...

...he is uniquely different from other animals by virtue of his power to think...

...Man is a creature of emotion, an organism which adapts to, and modifies, its environment...

...It is not the belief that all persons can profitably read Clerk-Maxwell's Electricity and Magnetism, Galois's Mathematical Papers or Kant's Critique of Pure Reason--and this before their twentieth year...

...Contrast this conclusion with modern education, which, not by deduction but by inquiry, discovers that men have a great many needs in common and yet vary greatly...

...If one recommends the study of a subject for the purpose of developing the intellectual powers of students, one cannot believe, without deceiving himself, that such powers are general and that they can be brought to bear equally well on the problems of all fields...

...he is a master of the unqualified phrase...

...John's College...

...Hutchins's educational views is found in his book, Conflicts in Education...

...Jefferson was no less a democrat because he believed that intellectual capacities are unequal...

...Indeed, do we not often notice today that there is no more agreement about human affairs among those who have developed a common set of intellectual skills in their profession than among those who have not acquired such skills...

...Since the best is not too good when all men are rulers, it should be adopted today...

...The curriculum of the elementary and high schools is to be reorganized in such a way as to make this scheme of liberal education (the only kind of liberal education, we are told) possible for all students...

...Since by definition all men have a common nature, both the education appropriate to that nature and the means of achieving it, the educational curriculum, must be common...

...Hutchins really desires a curriculum relevant to democratic living and citizenship, then he should give greater attention to the development in students of attitudes and emotions necessary to recognize our interdependences, our collective responsibilities and concrete individual duties...