The Rise and Fall of Progressive Education

 The following text is a draft of a chapter I am working on for an upcoming book. Text is copyrighted under my name. There are several quotes near the end which are not sourced, but their sources are, in most cases, obvious. I hereby give permission to quote short passages for scholarly purposes. Formatting irregularities are unavoidable.

The Rise and Fall of Progressive Education 

by Martin Cothran

At the beginning of C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace Clarence Scrubb, a spoiled and troublesome child, finds himself at a “progressive” school called, “Experiment House” where his progressive parents have sent him.  Eustace calls his teetotalling, non-smoking, vegetarian parents by their first names, and they wear a special sort of underwear.  Experiment House has all the interesting quirks his parents have—and more. The subjects in the curriculum all have familiar names in order to make sure they are “relevant” to the children. In addition, each subject is taught differently, and Bibles are “not encouraged.” Discipline is different at the school: instructors do not consider children who bully other children as “bad,” but rather as “interesting psychological cases,” and think that “children ought to be allowed to do as they like.”

If Experiment House doesn’t sound familiar, it should.  Lewis was obviously lampooning some of the schools in the England of his day.  The sort of romantic educational permissivism that manifested itself at Experiment House was quite evident at schools like Summerhill in Suffolk, England, which had become a mecca for progressivist educators in the 1920’s, 30’s, and 40’s.  And England wasn’t the only place you could find such schools.  The romanticism, the relativism, and the utilitarian rationalism that characterized Lewis’ imaginary school could be found in the 1880s in places like the Laboratory School and the Cook County Normal School in Chicago, and the Horace Mann School in New York.  If modern American education went in search of its roots, it would find them here.

  The movement that came to be known as the “Progressive education movement” had its origins in two impulses that came to dominate schools in the early 20^th century.  The first was a utilitarian vocationalism that attempted to transform schools into glorified job training centers to fit children into the industrial and agricultural economy; the second was a romantic progressivism that sought to harness the schools to help realize a utopian vision of society. Both of these movements had the effect of moving schools further away from their original academic emphasis.  The “Manual Training” Movement of the late 19^th century and the Progressives Education movement of the early 20^th century pulled schools away from their original academic moorings and towards purposes never before conceived to be educational.  Both of these impulses in America’s educational history are documented in Lawrence Cremin’s The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education 1876-1957.[i]  Cremin, a professor at Columbia University Teachers College for many years, is still regarded as the greatest historian of American education.  His three volume history of American education, one of which won the Pulitzer Prize, is still the standard reference work on the subject.  Cremin documents the many attempts to hijack schools to serve some societal purpose other than actual education.  The Manual Training Movement and progressivism are only the most notable and general of these attempts.

The Manual Training Movement
What came to be known as the “Manual Training” movement began in the 1870s, when John D. Runkle, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) happened to walking through the industrial exhibits at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 and came across the Russian display cases in Machinery Hall.  It was a time when America, like other Western nations, was becoming more intentional about their role in the industrial revolution.  Runkle was interested in the problem of how to train students for the kinds of jobs that were increasingly coming into demand in America’s cities: jobs that required skilled workers to operate the new machinery that was driving industrialization.  Up to that point, technical institutions did not really have hands on training of the kind that was needed to fuel the new industrial economy, but Runkle saw in the work of the Moscow Imperial Technical School, headed by Victor Della Vos, exactly what he thought was wanting in American technical schools: construction shops that would give aspiring workers the hands-on training they needed to service the nations burgeoning industry.  Rather than having students spend all their time with books, actual experience in what they were being trained to do had to become a part of the schools daily activity.  He wanted a schooling that would “marry the mental and the manual.”[ii]

In the meantime another man, Calvin M. Woodward of Washington University in St. Louis was already preparing the way by having become an outspoken critic of the exclusive emphasis on academic instruction in the nation’s schools.  Woodward too had become convinced—by his own experiences unsuccessfully trying to teach students how to work in a woodshop—that students needed hands-on vocational training along with the academic instruction they were receiving in schools.  He concluded that the traditional book-oriented method used by schools, with its emphasis on gentlemanliness and culture, was outmoded and that it “oftener unfits than fits a man for earning his living.”[iii]  Initially, Woodward claimed that he was not asking for schools to change their purpose from academic institutions to trade schools, only that they should include manual training in their larger academic mission. He also claimed that he was not asking for schools to teach with specific and immediate vocations goals, but only that schools teach the basic manual arts that would fit them for a wide range of trades.  “The trades are many,” he said, “but the arts are few.”  Training students in the general manual arts would be the best preparation for fitting them for the trades.  To limit the education of students to purely academic subjects when many of them would be entering trades was to ill serve them, he argued.  We must therefore teach the “whole boy.”[iv]

Woodward’s cause was not unpopular.  In fact, it attracted an increasing number of adherents during the 1870s and early 1880s until finally its detractors counterattacked.   At its national meeting in 1882, Woodward was challenged to what amounted to a showdown by Albert P. Marble, superintendent of Worcester, Massachusetts school system.  Marble argued that the kind of manual training championed by Woodward simply did not fit the mission of the school:

[T]he schools we have to conduct are to train boys and girls in those directions that are common to everybody, and one of the things that the boys and girls ought to learn in those schools is how to get information from books.  There is no information stored up in the plow, hoe handle, [or] steam engine; but there is information stored up in books … The saw is brought into the recitation room, and the teacher says, “now, saw.” It is a thing that does not belong to the school at all. It belongs outside, and ought to be attended to outside.[v]

But the most significant opposition to Woodward’s manual training ideas came from William Torrey Harris, the influential superintendent of St. Louis schools.  Harris argued that Woodward’s idea of the “whole boy” reeked of “Rousseauianism”—a reference to the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose romanticism would, according to many later critics, come to be one of the chief influences on the philosophy and practice of schools.  As for tool work being educative, recounts Lawrence Cremin, “Harris noted that so were marbles, quoits, baseball, and jackstraws, but this did not command for them a place in the school … To teach a child carpentry, Harris warned, is to give him a limited knowledge of self and nature; to teach him to read is to offer him the key to all human wisdom.” And to punctuate the point, he added, “It is the difference between a piece of baked bread, which nourishes for the day, and the seed-corn, which is the possibility of countless harvests.”[vi]

But the Manual Training Movement continued to gather steam, and the subject became the topic of even broader debates at the NEA’s 1889 meeting.  Not only did the impetus for this come from the industrial interests, it also had support among the nation’s still prominent agricultural interests.  While Woodward and others were pushing to make room for industrial training, people like “Uncle Henry” Wallace of the influential Wallace’s Farmer and William Dempster Hoard, editor of Hoard’s Dairyman, were battening at the doors of the educational establishment demanding that schools spend more time training farmers.  More and more of the common schools not only introduced manual training in schools, but began to displace their academic programs to make for them. 

In 1903, Woodward, who had claimed he was pressing for manual training but not direct vocational instruction, dropped any pretense that vocationalism should be just part of the schools’ curricula, announcing that “by multiplying manual training schools we solve the problem of training all the mechanics our country needs.”[vii] The debate about whether schools should be involved in vocational instruction as a major goal was essentially over, the only question remaining being, not whether to do it, but how it should be done.  The final stroke came in 1917, when the U. S. Congress passed the Smith-Hughes Act, which launched the federal involvement in the promotion of vocational training in schools that has lasted to this day. 

The consequences if this change in the purpose of schools is still being felt today, but even early on, the problem with schools trying to anticipate the vicissitudes of the economy was clear.  The old apprenticeship model, where young men spent time with those in a particular trade and learned it first hand from someone who did it for a living was in the course of being replaced by hands-on instruction in the schools.  That trades are learned better through apprenticeship rather than school instruction—even it is hands-on—will seem common sense to some.  Was it a purpose, in other words, that was best served by schools?  In addition, there was the problem with the idea that schools were capable of anticipating the kind of jobs that would be available for the students graduating from manual training programs—and it didn’t take long to determine how big a problem that was.  In 1921, just four years after the passage of the Smith-Hughes act, the evidence began coming in.  Cremin writes:

As Paul Douglas pointed out in a perceptive criticism written shortly after World War I[viii] the very sort of craft-oriented instruction to which the Smith Hughes Act had committed the nation had already been left behind by the onrush of technological advance.  The craftsmen who left industry to become the teachers of vocational subjects too easily isolated themselves from the mainstream of industrial innovation.  With the machinery purchased for school use was itself soon outmoded by technological improvement.  It took less than forty years for American industry, facing a new apprenticeship crisis after World War II, to reclaim for itself educational responsibilities it had so easily abandoned in the early decades of the century.

Not only has this problem of school keeping up with the economy to which they have been charged with fitting students not improved: it has become even worse thanks to the increasing pace of technological innovation.  The question is not whether Marble and Harris were right in the criticisms, but whether they were more right than they could have known.

The Educational Science

As the advocates of vocationalism were trying with increasing success to force the nation’s educational enterprise onto a new course, the champions of science and psychology were tugging it in another direction. The 19^th century saw the exaltation of the sciences to a position of cultural influence and authority far beyond the dreams of scientists themselves.  When Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, he was surprised at the enthusiastic reception it received.  He couldn’t figure out why a book which went into painful detail about beetles and barnacles and the process of their development had captured the imagination of so many people. There was increasing interest and respect for this new field which promised to explain so many things that had thus far remained a mystery.  The explanatory powers of science had been evident for some time.  Copernicus had published his heliocentric hypothesis in 1514; Galileo had invented the telescope in 1609; and Isaac Newton had announced his three laws of universal motion in 1687.  But for a movement to have wide influence and appeal, it needs a name and a distinct identity.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “scientist” didn’t even exist as a distinct term until the 1800s, and was only coined in 1934, coming into popular use only around the turn of the century.  Before that time, scientists considered themselves “natural philosophers.” 

A number of thinkers and events conspired to bring the influence of science to bear on education in America.  The first of these was Herbert Spencer, a British philosopher and political thinker who was one of the first to fully appreciate the broader significance of Darwin’s ideas.  In fact, it was Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the expression, “survival of the fittest.”  Spencer took Darwin’s ideas on evolution and began to apply them to areas of thought outside natural science.  He wrote on ethics, religion, and psychology, and it was Spencer who earned the dubious distinction of being the inventor of what later came to be known as “social Darwinism.”  But it was his book Education that had the greatest influence on Americans.[ix]  In it, he propounded the idea that the purpose of education was to “prepare us for a complete living.”  And for such a goal, which to Spencer involved instruction on the necessities of life, the discipline of offspring, social and political relations, as well as gratification of tastes and feelings, the thing needed was science. 

Spencer’s influence was directly felt on what came to be known as the Report of the Committee of Ten.  It is hard for those of us living at a time in which reports on education seem to be a daily event to appreciate the significance such a report could have in a far less jaded time.  Headed by Charles Eliot, who 24 years earlier had been elected President of Harvard, the Committee of Ten collected together a group of scholars and education professionals who, under Eliot’s leadership, attempted to restate what it was that schools were for.  It articulated what Eliot had long been saying: that the nation needed a “new education,” on which placed science on a parity with the other disciplines.  This “new education” would emphasize applied sciences, modern languages, and mathematics.  But ironically, Spencer, along with his American disciple, William Graham Sumner, a political and social science professor at Yale, were among the most ardent opponents of sweeping reform schemes of the kind working themselves out in people like Eliot and groups like the Committee of Ten.  Social Darwinism of the kind Spencer propounded (along with Sumner, his American lieutenant) spurned the idea that the natural and inevitable forces of evolution could be stymied.  But while Spencer and Sumner believed in a sort of inevitable evolutionary determinism, those who believed evolution could be guided and controlled had them outnumbered, and Eliot was among the most prominent of those who believed in a reform-minded social evolution.

For Spencer evolution was essentially purposeless, but for Eliot and others it was amenable to the purposes of reformers like themselves. So Eliot and figures like paleontologist Lester Frank Ward took Spencer’s idea that the school should prepare students for a living, and left Spencer’s determinism behind. For them, students were not a social tool in the hands of an inexorable evolutionary process, but rather education was the malleable enterprise in the hands of society for society’s betterment. And here we have the origin of the modern idea of Education as the great panacea.  Education, in the minds of Eliot and others, became a road to utopia—a scientific enterprise that could reform society.  Education from this time forward would command an almost religious devotion.  It had now become something much more than it was before.  Before, education could only bring children to a knowledge of the truth; now it could change society.  It could also change human nature itself.

Along with the rise in the influence of the hard sciences, came the rise of psychology.  Over the last 200-300 years, the hard sciences—biology, chemistry, physics—have soaked up most of the intellectual spotlight.  Science gained an intellectual prestige which other academic disciplines came to envy.  After all, science “works” in a way that other disciplines do not.  In fact, “to work” in the sense of practical application, is part of what science is in a way that it is not for other disciplines.  But by the 19^th century, many of what we used to call the “moral sciences,” such as history, economics, and political philosophy (now recast as “political science”) were re-categorized as “social sciences.”  In fact, the whole idea of “social sciences” is a testimony to the desire of other disciplines to acquire some of the prestige of the hard sciences.  The result was a set of disciplines which mimicked the language, the practices, and the goals of science.  The academic robe once worn by the old educational masters was figuratively replaced with a white coat, and every subject wanted to be science when it grew up.  Enter psychology.

The first doctorate in psychology granted by Harvard University was conferred on Granville Stanley Hall in 1878.  After studying in Germany for a few years, he returned to America and took a professorship at Johns Hopkins University, where he taught many students.  One of them was a young man named John Dewey.  Hall’s influence in the new field of psychology grew to massive proportions, and (thanks in part to his influence on Dewey) it spilled over into education.  A friend once introduced him to an audience as the “Darwin of the Mind,”[x] largely because of his introduction of evolutionary concepts into psychology.  According to his “general psychonomic law,” the development of an individual mimics the evolution of the race; in other words, individual humans go through stages of development on the path toward adulthood in the same way that human beings go through stages of evolution on their path toward becoming a human. [xi]

Hall became the first of many thinkers who made child development the center of their study. It was Hall, armed with this new view of child development, and glowing with the scientific aura that attended it, who first urged that the contents of the curriculum should be determined on the basis of “the data of child development.”  “Here,” says Cremin, “his key concept concerned the difference between the scholiocentric and the pedocentric school”[xii]—between, in other words, the scholarship-centered school and the child-centered school. No longer would the child be forced to approximate some scholarly ideal devised by the community of learned people: now the ideal would have to adapt itself to the child.  Under the Manual Training Movement, there was a shift from academics as the material cause of education to job skills.  Under the New Psychology, there was a shift in the formal cause of education: from being determined by academics to being determined by the psychology of the child.  “The shift was truly Copernican,” said Cremin, “its effects legion”:

On the one hand it hastened the acceptance of academic studies long barred from the school by reason of tradition, custom, or simple apathy.  On the other hand, it opened the pedagogical floodgates to every manner of activity, trivial as well as useful, that seemed in some way to minister to “the needs of the children.” Reformers had a field day, as did sentimentalists, and American schools were never quite the same again! (Cremin, p. 104)

But Hall did not break ranks with Spencer on the issue of changing the student to fit some outside purpose.  Like Spencer, Hall’s view of evolution involved only adaptation to environment, and his educational views involved only helping to adapt the child to his environment: it did not involve changing the environment to which he had to adapt. He was not “reform-minded,” he was “adaptation-minded.”  Another thinker was required in order to complete the progressivist picture: William James. 

James, a philosopher who gained great influence and repute within his lifetime, was one of several American philosophers called “pragmatists.” James, also an adherent to the evolutionary gospel, scorned the idea of naturalistic determinism and believed that, in addition to the environment molding humans (where Spencer and Hall stopped), humans molded their environment.  We are ever reacting to our environment in manifold ways, and the kinds of reactions we choose ultimately form themselves into habits.  But, by the decisions we make, we have a role in determining what these habits eventually become.  The purpose of education, thought James, was to actively guide the impulses and reactions of youth in such a way as to turn the child into a “purposeful, thinking adult” who will “use his talents to the fullest in the struggle for a better life.”  The educational enterprise was now not only child-centered, but focused on improving the child around whom education was centered—and, that once done, improving the environment by which he was surrounded. 

But how exactly to change the child who would then go on to change society? This required one more thinker: Edward L. Thorndike.  Thorndike was a student of James at Harvard University who inaugurated his scientific life by studying the instinctive and intelligent behavior of chickens.  He went on to write his dissertation on animal intelligence—a dissertation which Cremin calls a “landmark in psychology.”[xiii] Through his experiments with cats in what he called a “problem box,” Thorndike discovered that, through a process of conditioning, animals could figure out that certain behaviors had certain favorable and unfavorable consequences, and could learn over time to follow the behavior that was associated with favorable responses and avoid those with unfavorable consequences.  Thorndike simply took this stimulus/response model, which he called “connectionism,” and applied it to humans—who, according to evolutionary theory, were only advanced animals anyway. 

But the most significant aspect of Thorndike’s ideas was his rejection of the concept of the mind as anything other than the response of the organism to its environment:

As Thorndike later pointed out in his classic three-volume work Educational Psychology, this conception does more than render psychology a science by making it the study of observable, measurable human behavior.  In one fell swoop, it discards the Biblical view that man’s nature is essentially sinful and hence untrustworthy; the Rousseauan view that man’s nature is essentially good and hence always right; and the Lockean view that man’s nature is ultimately plastic and hence completely modifiable.  Human nature, Thorndike maintained, is simply a mass of “original tendencies” that can be exploited for good or bad, depending on what learning takes place.[xiv]

These thinkers in the late 19^th century had begun by applying science to education; they ended in transforming education into a science—a science that, they believed, could improve children, and through the improvement of children, could improve society itself.

All of these sometimes competing tendencies in education were brought together in the thinking of John Dewey.  A one-man clearing house for the experimental educational thinking going on around him, Dewey brought together the emphasis on the importance of preparing students for real life preached by Calvin Woodward; the child-centered focus of G. Stanley Hall; the reform-oriented pragmatism of William James; and the “connectionism” of Edward L. Thorndike.  All these thinkers, with Dewey ultimately at their head, were opposed to the old classical system, with its exclusively academic emphasis, its focus on fitting the child to the curriculum, its emphasis on passing on a culture, and its idea of a perennial human nature.  Dewey’s Democracy in Education, published in 1916 stands as the ultimate statement of educational progressivism. 

Progressivism seemed to be sweeping the field, but there were a few of the old guard who refused to go down without a fight.  The year 1917 was also the publication of R. W. Livingstone’s A Defense of Classical Education, a clarion call to man the battlements of the old classical education.  “The nation is discontented with its education,” he begins, “probably too discontented.”  Indeed it was.  But Livingstone was still hopeful, thinking that it would all blow over: “When the black fit passes,” he assured, “we shall take a more reasonable view of our deficiencies.[xv]”  As compelling as was the book’s case for Latin and Greek instruction, his hope that educational sobriety would follow the progressivist binge was misplaced.  Soon would come the end of World War I, and as many observers have pointed out, the end of an age.  What many called the “Great War” (World War I) had destroyed many things, and what many called the “Old Order” itself was weakened or crumbling.  The European map had to be completely redrawn to reflect the reconstitution of entire nations, and those who ruled before the war could not be counted upon to remain. What was once taken for granted could no longer be relied upon.  It was a time of wholesale cultural change, and this was more the case in Europe than in United States, but America felt it too:

By the time the Armistice was signed in 1918, calls for commercial and useful knowledge on both sides of the Atlantic, combined with blasted ideals and the horror of those fine young men now lying in foreign graves, carried too much firepower to resist … A new world waited to be built.  Time had run out for the niceties of learning the words of the dead.”[xvi]

Greek, says Tracy Lee Simmons, was no longer even required to enter Oxford by the 1920s.  Only Latin remained, and even that classical language was eventually expelled from the lower grades and relegated to the high school, and the focus on systematic Latin grammar began to yield to newer methods.  A handful of classical scholars put up a brave defense: “Scholars like Gilbert Murray, J. W. Mackail, and Richard Livingstone became evangelists and hit the lecture circuit with the zeal of men on a military campaign,” says Simmons.  “They didn’t want to go down without a fight.”[xvii]  Had there been bridges to burn in their retreat, they would have burned them, but what classical structures were left standing could be counted on to be destroyed by the Progressives anyway. Where classics were still taught, translations took the place the original Greek or Latin, and classical studies themselves were taken over by the experts, rendering them the exclusive domain of the experts.

As often happens with lost causes, by the time those apologists had erected their buttressed defenses, the brave had fallen.  It remained only to collect the wounded.  Whereas once Latin and Greek, together with their literature and all else they drew in their train, were thought to make the complete human being and lay a foundation for higher culture, now they were dead weight in a leveling age, millstones dragging down the new day dawning.  People began to think that classical knowledge closed more doors than it opened; it shut out the light; it slowed the pulse of a quickening world.  All things were to be made new.  What good is climbing a Parnassus within when we can build skyscrapers without?  The dikes could hold back the waters no longer.  Pres nous le Deluge.[xviii]

The gaggle of progressivist ideas that had been taking shape since 1876 had now been brought together into a tenuous alliance, but they needed to be permanently housed in something more substantial than the mind of John Dewey.  In 1919, Stanwood Cobb, the principal of Chevy Chase Day School, founded the Association for the Advancement of Progressive Education, which later became the Progressive Education Association.  They met on April 4 of that year, and they left the meeting with the feeling of missionaries being sent out to save the world.  “Our aim from the very beginning,” said Cobb, “had in it little of modesty.  We aimed at nothing short of reforming the entire school system of America.”[xix]  But the group began under something less than favorable auspices when Dewey himself refused to join, a slight that was compensated for by Charles Eliot agreeing to become the organization’s first honorary president.

Through conventions, bulletins, and journals, the hopes of its founders seemed to have been well-founded.  The Journal of Progressive Education in particular became the organization’s chief propaganda tool, and it seemed to work.  By 1928, Margaret Nauburg, writing for The Nation, could write with some plausibility, “Anything less than ‘progressive education’ is now quite out of date in America. No one wishes any longer to be called conservative.”[xx]  Indeed the organization had gained such widespread favor that, in 1926, Dewey himself finally agreed to accept the honorary chairmanship upon the death of Eliot.  It was a heady time.

It was a matter of dogma with progressives that they had no particular program or position—or even philosophy.  They had set down a “statement of principles” when the Progressive Education Association was founded which was carried in each edition of the journal, but the journal dropped them in 1930 just to underscore that they, in fact, didn’t have any.  They got around the somewhat untenable position that what they stood for was not standing on anything by saying that their movement was characterized by a “spirit,” a “method,” an “outlook.”[xxi] So averse were they to any kind of explicit authority or philosophical rigidity (this, after all, was what they were using the authority of their position to get schools themselves to avoid) that they ended up dropping the reformist emphasis of their early years.  Dewey himself, only two years after accepting the organization’s honorary presidency, rebuked the Association for its failure to live up to its original ideals. The term “progressive,” after all, assumed progress, and progress was the movement toward some goal.  For Dewey the goal was reforming society to make it more explicitly democratic, and the progressive movement, which had gotten caught up in fitting children to society, had forgotten the original goal of changing the society they were being fitted to.

Dewey’s rebuke reverberated throughout the movement, and it gave the more left-leaning political forces within the movement an excuse to assert themselves.  At the Progressive Education Association’s 1932 convention, George S. Counts delivered a fateful address, entitled, “Dare Progressive Education be Progressive?”  His rallying cry was heavy on Marxist rhetoric, and directed much of its venom against capitalism and tradition, advocating a more socialist economy and a new tradition.  He also scolded the progressive movement for shrinking from the practice of indoctrination in dealing with students:

You will say, no doubt, that I am flirting with the idea of indoctrination. And my answer is again in the affirmative. Or, at least, I should say that the word does not frighten me. We may all rest assured that the younger generation in any society will be thoroughly imposed upon by its elders and by the culture into which it is born.[xxii]

Counts views were the result of the ferment at Columbia University Teachers College, where he and others such as William H. Kilpatrick and R. Bruce Raup had been meeting in a study group since 1927 to discuss the effects of social change on education.  His speech lit a fire among the conference participants, who talked in the halls late into the night about its implications.  The scheduled talks for the next day were abandoned as excited delegates talked on about Counts’ speech.  Two days later, the Association appointed a committee to deal with the issue, with Counts at its head. 

Counts speech was undoubtedly an overreaction to Dewey, and one which Dewey himself would probably have disapproved of, but it was not Dewey whom the progressives would ultimately have to worry about.  When his committee later issued what came to be called the “Counts Report,” it set the stage for the final battle the Progressive Education Association would have to fight—and which it would not be able to win.  The Report, says Cremin, “branded the stigma of radicalism on the PEA, like it or not.  It was a stigma destined to exert growing influence as the decade progressed.”[xxiii]

But the immediate effect of the report was to prompt a new debate among the progressives about what exactly their movement was about.  And what better way to settle the issue than convene yet another committee.  In 1938, the Association appointed a committee on the philosophy of education which in 1940 rendered another report, which set forth the principles of progressive education along Deweyan lines.  But these principles were never formally adopted, and they came too late anyway.  The larger progressive era was over, and the public had become more conservative.  The Progressive Education Association began to take on public fire for its more widely known radical political and social positions.  By the early 1940s, the organization had begun to bleed members until it came into imminent danger of collapse, and by the spring of 1944, at its lowest ebb since its founding, the Association finally adopted a set of principles. “The Association was by 1944 a shadow of its former self,” recounts Cremin, “indeed there were so few members that or the first time in its history it adopted a formal policy statement … After a quarter-century, the PEA finally had a creed; but few people cared, and even fewer read it.”[xxiv]

Although weakened and with little actual remaining influence on education policy in the country, that didn’t prevent the Association from bearing the brunt of the public fury that was already building.  The ideas that the Association and the larger progressive movement espoused—displacing academics with social skills; moving the locus of authority away from the teacher and to the student; deemphasizing thinking in favor of doing; abandoning the curricular emphasis in favor of “child-centeredness,” in addition to its increasingly radical political priorities—were to mark the movement’s impact on schools, and the forces opposed to them were now taking shape.

At the same time as the movement was acquiring a politically and socially radical image, another force was at work.  The Progressive Education Association was not the only institution pushing progressivism, and among the other influential forces was the U. S. Office of Education.  In 1947, after convening regional gatherings to study problems in the nation’s secondary schools, it set up a nine-member Commission on Life Adjustment Education for Youth.  It had decidedly non-academic purposes in mind. It’s purpose, it said, was “to equip all American youth to live democratically with satisfaction to themselves and profit to society as home members, workers, and citizens.”[xxv]  It was one particular strain of the progressive movement, and it ended up being the one to take most of the heat in the national educational crisis of the 1950s.  It had its last hurrah in 1954, but by that time it was clear that all it had succeeded in doing was to simply give the critics of progressivism more ammunition to use against it.

The opposition to progressivism had been building since the 1940s.  It was aggravated by a number of societal changes going on in the country.  There were a host of economic problems consequent upon the end of World War II, particularly a lack of money for things like school buildings and the problem of rampant inflation.  And at a time when the “war babies” were descending upon the schools, teachers were leaving the profession in droves—some of the female teachers perhaps, because they were having babies.  In addition, there were increasing national security concerns as a result of the expansionist communism of the Soviet Union and communist China.  The public, in other words, was in a bad mood.  So when the problems which progressivism had wrought in schools began to be made, progressive educators made an easy target.

When Willard E. Goslin, a nationally known progressive educator, was fired in June of 1950 as superintendent of schools in Pasadena, California, the battle began in earnest.  Goslin had been deposed by an array of conservative groups who saw educational progressivism as one of the many tentacles of a larger political and cultural menace.  It was the Cold War, and many Americans were now looking askance at individuals and organizations which had been a part of social progressivism, which they saw, with some reason, to be a part the larger global socialist movement now associated with America’s chief international nemeses, the Soviet Union and communist China.  The Korean War began in the same year, and Americans were once again sending young men to be killed in foreign places they had never heard about, fighting armies who professed a political agenda which seemed to many to be similar to that espoused by those who were directing the nation’s schools.  The radical rhetoric of the Progressive Education Association’s “Counts Report” was now a part of the identity of progressive education, and the public was now taking notice.  Counts had succeeded in painting a target on the door of the organization’s headquarters and the enemies of progressivism were taking aim.

There was plenty of anti-communist sentiment that was as reactionary as progressivism was radical.  The National Council for American Education, for example, published a pamphlet entitled, “How Red is the Little Red Schoolhouse?” “The pamphlet’s cover,” said Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak, “pictured a Soviet soldier injecting a hypodermic labeled ‘organized Communist Propaganda’ into the Little Red Schoolhouse.”[xxvi]  But there were other, less reactionary conservative critics concerned about the state of education. In the same year, Life Magazine devoted an entire issue to the crisis is American schools.[xxvii]  There were also a number of books by more level-headed critics.  The response of the progressivists was to accuse its critics of being “enemies of education,” a tactic they have often used since against those who disagreed with their educational philosophy.  But that defense did little to deflect the onslaught.

The perceived political radicalism of the movement, along with it the lack of academic emphasis combined to doom progressivism.  Its real problems were bad enough, but these were aggravated by the practices of its less competent adherents, who took what were already bad ideas and made them worse:

As progressive education became the new orthodoxy in the second quarter of the century, however, it was seldom practiced as originally preached.  Much of the intellectual vitality of the movement seemed sapped.  School curricula had been vastly expanded but often at the expense of learning basic skills thoroughly.  In some schools students could choose from such subjects as how to date, dance, dress properly, drive a car, decorate a living room, flycast, shop, cook, curl hair, budget money.  These were functional skills to be sure, but not when they nearly replaced reading, writing, and mathematics.[xxviii]

The Life Adjustment Movement was a sort of break-off group from the main column of progressivism.  It was the central split resulting from the chief fissure in the philosophy of progressivism: that between the social reform ideal and the ideal of preparing children for “real life.”  Dewey had tried to keep the two ideas together, but they came apart readily, and the Life Adjustment movement marched under the latter banner.  It was even more self-evidently anti-academic.  “We shall some day accept the thought that it is just as illogical to assume that every boy must be able to read,” declared one professional educator addressing the National Association of Secondary-School Principals in the early fifties, “as it is that each one must be able to perform on the violin, that it is no more reasonable to require that teach girl shall spell well than it is that each one shall bake a good cherry pie.”[xxix] The public anger at this kind of touchy-feely attitude among those who were supposed to be readying their children for college caused a firestorm of protest. 

Not only was the political and social reform aspect of progressivism undermining American values, but it was dumbing down the younger generation.  Numerous pamphlets and books were produced by the critics.  In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published Why Johnny Can’t Read and What You Can Do About It.  Flesch was an editor at the Saturday Evening Post and had written several popular books on how to write clearly and understandably.  The book, an assault on the new “look-say” method of reading used by the progressivists (one species of the larger genus of whole word reading strategies that neglected decoding skills) and a defense of the systematic phonics they had thrown out of schools, was a model of the clear and compelling prose he preached.  Although it did not directly attack progressivism, it fit in perfectly with the wider critique of the progressivist attempt to dumb down a nation.  “[A]s the book sat on the best-seller list week after week, giving rise to dozens of articles in national magazines, it strongly reinforced the notion that the progressive educators were the culprits.”[xxx] 

Although much of the criticism of progressivism seemed itself a bit radical, the anti-progressivism movement also produced some of the most reasoned and articulate defenses of traditional education ever penned.  Among the bevy of anti-progressive books published during the period was Educational Wastelands, by Arthur Bestor.  It was Bestor who proved to be the progressivists’ worst enemy.  “[It] was Bestor,” said Cremin, “whose attacks were destined to exert the most telling impact on the progressive movement.”[xxxi] Bestor was a history professor who did a short stint at Columbia Teachers College but had also taught at Stanford and the University of Illinois. His scholarly credentials were impeccable, and no one could plausibly accuse him of radicalism.  He launched his attack in the American Scholar, the Phi Beta Kappa society’s flagship journal.  And that was only the beginning.  “There followed,” says Cremin, “a series of brilliantly polemical essays in The New Republic, the Scientific Monthly, and the American Association of University Professors Bulletin that ripped savagely into the theory and practice of the life-adjustment movement—and then, in 1953, Educational Wastelands.”[xxxii] Educational Wastelands stands as the quintessential case for traditional education.  It may well be the single greatest defense of traditional education ever written.

“If we really believe that education is vital to our safety,” said Bestor, “then we need to know exactly what kind of schooling constitutes genuine education, and what kind is merely a gaudy show.”  Freely quoting Thomas Jefferson, he articulated clearly and succinctly what he thought education was:

The kind of schooling that is vital to a democratic society is the kind that results in the "spread of information" and the "diffusion of knowledge, … the kind that recognizes that "the general mind must be strengthened by education;" the kind that aims to make the people "enlightened" and to "inform their discretion." These are the ends that the schools must serve if a free people are to remain free. These, be it noted, are intellectual ends. Genuine education, in short, is intellectual training.[xxxiii]

Bestor slammed the progressives, not for failing to educate well, but for failing to educate at all.  The problem, he argued, was not that the nation’s educators were not implementing education properly or not teaching well.  The problem was that they were opposed to education itself.  They had redefined what schools were for: “The concept of education that I have just stated is not guiding the American public schools today,” he charged. “It is a concept which professors of education have repudiated, and which they caricature at every opportunity.”  Progressive educators were not failing to meet the nation’s education goals; rather, they simply did not have education goals.  The schools had detached themselves from the scholarly world altogether, setting up what he called an “interlocking directorate” made up of educations bureaucrats, education professors and teaching colleges, all of which served to house the enemies of learning.

 Bestor’s book, along with Albert Lynd’s Quackery in the Public Schools, Robert Hutchins’ The Conflict in Education, and Paul Woodring’s Let’s talk Sense about Our Schools, served to provide the intellectual grounding for the rejection of progressivism.

So discredited had the progressive movement become that in 1955 that the New York Times announced that the Progressive Education Association was closing its doors.  Its publication, Progressive Education continued publication for two more years, and then folded.  Then, on October 4, 1957, an event occurred that served to drive a stake through the heart of the whole progressive education movement, and it came from outer space.

“Sputnik” was the name of the first orbiting satellite launched into space, and it was launched by the Russians.  It was followed a month later by another Russian satellite which carried a live dog.  It was a stunning public relations victory for the Soviet Union, which could now plausibly claim that it had proven its technological superiority over the United States by beating the U.S. into space.  A stricken nation now looked for the cause.  What had happened?  How had the Russians been able to fly past America on the road to scientific progress?  There was only one answer: the schools. All fingers were now pointed toward progressive education.  “After two Sputniks,” lamented Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak in their irreverent and defensive treatment, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were: 

the already swelling outcry against the educational system became a deafening roar.  Everyone joined in—the President, the Vice-President, admirals, generals, morticians, grocers, bootblacks, bootleggers, realtors, racketeers—all lamenting the fact that we didn’t get a hunk of metal orbiting the earth and blaming this tragedy on the sinister Deweyites who had plotted to keep little Johnny from learning to read.  Special commissions were set up.  Congressional hearings were held.  TV and radio stations interrupted the flow of commercials and soap operas to air educational grievances.[xxxiv]   

Blood was in the water, and a full feeding frenzy was on.  In 1958, Life magazine devoted four full issues to the “Crisis in Education.” “The schools are in terrible shape,” it said, “…What has long been an ignored national problem, Sputnik has made a recognized crisis.”[xxxv] It was “the deepest educational crisis in the nation’s history,” said Cremin.[xxxvi]  

By the end of the 1950s, the progressive education movement was completely discredited, its utopian, child-centered, social reformist agenda in tatters.  It is hard to find any other popular cultural movement in American history that had experienced so fine a rise and so final a fall. So successful had it become in the 20s, 30s, and 40s that it was irrefutably the reigning pedagogy in nation’s schools, but in the 50s it had met its cultural Waterloo.  Now nothing was left to do but gather up the wounded—and retreat to the teachers colleges.

The Swinging Pendulum

Diane Ravitch has referred to the “pendulum swing” that has characterized education policy in the 20^th century: the movement from a progressivist emphasis in schools to a traditionalist one and back again.  When the Life Adjustment movement was driven from schools at the end of the 1950s, there was a short-lived attempt to return to the trappings of more traditional academic programs.  But the attempt was unenthusiastic and short lived, perhaps due to the lack of understanding and training on the part of professional educators. 

Since the early 20^th century teacher education has been conducted largely at the hands of teachers colleges, where progressivism in its various guises has always found a refuge.  Like the monster in Stephen King’s horror novel, It, progressivism runs in cycles lasting from 20 to 30 years that go something like this:

·       Acquires a new label and is trotted out of university education departments as a novel educational idea;

·       Enjoys brief public support through appealing rhetoric;

·        Attracts critical attention when it lowers academic achievement;

·       Is expelled from schools by parents and the general public, going back into hibernation in teachers colleges;

·       Acquires a new label when the public forgets how badly in worked the last time, as the cycle begins again

In other words, once the progressivist monster has eaten its cultural fill, it is driven out of schools by torch and pitchfork-wielding parents, going into hibernation in teachers colleges, and awaiting the right time to return once again.

The year 1960 saw the publication of A. S. Neill’s book Summerhill, a book Ravitch calls “one of the most influential books of the era.”  It described the progressive school Neill founded in Suffolk, England in 1921.  Neill was perhaps one of the most extreme of the romanticists operating in the world of education in the 20^th century. “I believe that to impose anything by authority is wrong,” he declared.  “The child should not do anything until he comes to the opinion—his own opinion—that it should be done.” He went on to refer to any external compulsion imposed on the child as “fascism.”[xxxvii]

Summerhill was the quintessential progressive school.  Ravitch describes Neill’s permissivist approach to education:

Echoing Rousseau, Neill wrote that “a child is innately wise and realistic.  If left to himself without adult suggestion of any kind, he will develop as far as he is capable of developing.”  Neill renounced “all discipline, all direction, all suggestion, all moral training, all religious instruction.” When children arrived at Summerhill, it was up to them to ask for lessons.  If they did not want any lessons, they were left undisturbed to play all day, if that was what they wanted, for months or even years (Neill proudly described one student who had spent twelve years at Summerhill without ever attending a single lesson).  Neill hated examinations, prizes, and marks, and he was contemptuous of books, which he considered “the least important apparatus in a school.” Summerhill had no special teaching methods, Neill wrote, “because we do not consider that teaching in itself matters very much.  Whether a school has or has not a special method for teaching long division is of no significance, for long division is of no importance except to those who want to learn it.  And the child who wants to learn long division will learn it no matter how it is taught.[xxxviii]

Neill was nothing if not consistent about his romanticism, and consequently his laissez faire approach extended to virtually every student activity, including sex, overlooking sexual liaisons between both students themselves, and students and teachers.  Somewhat along the lines of Aldous Huxley’s dystopia The Brave New World, Neill believed the sexual impulse should not only not be suppressed, but should be encouraged. “He maintained that unfettered heterosexual play was ‘the royal road’ to a healthy sex life,” says Ravitch, and was somewhat obsessive about the point. 

When Summerhill was published in 1960, not a single American bookseller placed an advanced order for it.  It was not yet time for the monster’s return.  But by about 1964, the public’s short memory had already forsaken it, and Neill’s book began to sell, and by 1970 it was selling at a clip of about 200,000 a year, and “was required reading in at least 600 university courses.”  Ravitch wryly remarks on the irony that a book on educational freedom would be “required reading in American universities.”[xxxix] Neill’s book was only the most notable of a spate of books released between 1964 and 1968 championing the new version of educational permissivism.  It was essentially the romantic progressivism of the 1930s repackaged and made to look new again, and it had a tonic effect on educators always looking for the latest thing and who had undoubtedly themselves forgotten what had happened in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, history (or any other legitimate academic subject) not being a strong suit in university education programs.  And it came at just the right time.

The counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s, in fact, seems in retrospect to have been the ideal cultural environment in which such educational ideas could thrive.  The period was marked by a cultural revolt among many young people whose motto was to “question authority,” and who professed not to “trust anyone over thirty.”  It was a time when a movement marked by immaturity was reaching maturity and where thousands joined hands, and, together as a group, proclaimed their individuality.  And, if their parents were wealthy enough to afford the requisite chemicals, they follow the advice of the Timothy Leary to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”  It seemed the perfect time for educators too to let it all hang out.  And they did.  “Meeting ‘the needs of youth’ was back in fashion,” says Ravitch, “’Relevance’ became both a slogan and a goal, to which many campuses responded by creating courses on revolution, youth movements, rock poetry, popular culture, and other topics intended to satisfy the student rebels.”

During this era, the word “requirements” became anathema.  College graduation requirements were reduced, and college entrance requirements, especially the foreign language requirement, tumbled; this, in turn, removed one of the most important incentives for studying a foreign language in high school. The demand for relevance in the curriculum encouraged students to turn inward and pursue their own interests; the necessity of appealing to students’ interest also spurred schools and colleges to “market” courses with alluring titles as if students were consumers in a vast education marketplace.[xl]

The term “progressive” having negative historical associations, the monster donned a new disguise: “Open Education.”  But, like the Life Adjustment movement, its unfortunate consequences quickly tarnished its reputation.  In his book Open Education and the American School, Roland Barth described his own attempt to impose open education on two inner city schools.  He recruited six teachers trained in open education who straightway moved their own desks to the back of the room, removed the rows of student desks, created “learning centers” for the now heterogeneously grouped children, and stood back and directed traffic.  But there was trouble in the new educational paradise:

The program succumbed to the resistance of both children and parents.  The multitude of choices confused the children; the more options were available, the less they were able to follow through on any one of them and the more disruptive they became.  Children “ganged up by tens and twenties outside the bathrooms and at the water fountains.  A teacher would turn his back on a class, to find only three of twenty-five youngsters left in the room when he turned around again.”  The children demanded “teacher-imposed order” and rejected teachers’ attempts to shift the responsibility for learning to them.[xli]

In three months, the program joined the growing scrapheap of abandoned progressive schemes.  Back came the teachers’ desks to the front of the room, back came the straight rows of student desks, back came ability grouping and hall passes and directive instructions.  The romanticists were foiled once again by the need for order and discipline.

Test scores reached a peak in 1963 and 1964, and then began a precipitous decline.  By 1975 parents had once again lit their torches, grabbed their pitchforks, and headed for the front doors of schoolhouses.  Panels and commissions once again set to work to identify the problem, and once again found that the problem wasn’t education done badly, but education not done at all.  One study of high school transcripts from 1964 to 1981 found a fractured curriculum, devalued coursework, and a curriculum overpopulated with nonacademic classes.  Most students were enrolled in the “general track.” “Neither academic nor vocation,” says Ravitch, “the general track consisted of courses such as driver education, general shop, remedial studies, consumer education, training for marriage and adulthood, health education, typing, and home economics.” Schools were failing to hit their educational targets because they weren’t aiming for them in the first place.

The educational ideology of the 1960s was a rehash of the progressivism of the 20s and 30s, but with a difference.  The older progressivism was the product of a larger cultural movement: it had come out of the Progressive Era and had in a sense been derived from it.  But the progressivism of the 60s was produced and sustained by what Arthur Bestor had described in the early 1950s as the “interlocking directorate” of teachers colleges, state education departments and teachers unions.  While the progressivism of the early 20^th century was partly directed at breaking the hold of corruptive institutional interests (including labor unions) on schools, the new progressivism was driven by new institutional interests that were at least as corruptive.  In fact, as bad as the old labor unions were (teachers jobs in places like Chicago were handed out as part of the political patronage system), at least it wasn’t intentionally directed at purging academics from schools.  Progressive education—in all its manifestations—was.

The progressivism of the 20s and 30s, which morphed into the “life adjustment” movement of the 40s and 50s, which then became the “modern education” of the late 50s and early 60s, which was then recast as “open education” in the mid-60s and 70s, has manifested itself most recently in what is called “constructivism.”  Like all of the monster’s previous mutations, this one is animated by the soul of romanticism.  Students would be motivated to learn “only if they were active learners, constructing their own knowledge through their own discoveries.”[xlii]

The Corruption of the Disciplines

But its repeated chastisements at the hands of an angry public—not to mention the facts—has not left progressives bereft of lessons learned.  Its advocates are wiser in at least one regard: driving academic subjects out of schools has become increasingly problematic.  Parents have become more aware of the increasing ideological gulf between them and those who make education policy, and there is an increasing distrust of experts.  Consequently, progressivists began to shift their strategy.  Rather than simply try to push academic subjects out of the curriculum, they began an effort to change the academic disciplines themselves. 

This seems to have occurred first in reading instruction, which began in the 1930s to deemphasize phonics in favor of word guessing methods.  The typical example of this method is the Elson readings, better known as the “Dick and Jane” books, which began publication in 1930.  They used the “whole word” or “look-say” method of simply having children memorize whole words instead of sounding them out according to letter-sound correspondences.  It was this method that Rudolf Flesch savaged in his Why Johnny Can’t Read for producing a nation of illiterates. [quote from Flesch’s book here]. 

The long battle—what Harvard reading specialist Jeanne Chall called the “reading wars”—was thought by some to be over in 1967, when Chall concluded on the basis of extensive research, that children need to know both how to decode words (phonics) and how to read good literature.  The problem with progressives was that they were not particularly concerned with what actually worked but seemed more concerned with the ideology of reading which, from their romanticist perspective, required freeing children from the oppressive idea that there was an actual order inherent in language that was being forced on children.  But in the 80s and 90s the debate flared up again with the onset of the “whole language” movement.  Whole language was a wholly constructivist approach to reading described by its originators as a “psycholinguistic guessing game” which purported, as with all progressive approaches, to address the “whole child” by giving him “authentic” reading experiences.  Reading instruction, said whole language advocates, had to be “whole, real, and relevant.” Consequently, it spurned not only phonics, but explicit instruction in spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Children were encouraged to use “invented spelling,” and teachers were warned against correcting the writing of their students.  Children were to read when they wanted to read, not by being forced by a teacher to do it.

The nation’s schools of education, long committed to progressive educational ideas, provided a ready audience of a theory that said that children are naturally motivated to learn and that they need to be insulated from instruction, textbooks, tests, and anything else that might interfere with their natural desire to learn.

A 1985 report, Becoming a Nation of Readers, found, once again, that children taught using phonics are better readers, as did another 1990 report by Marilyn Jager Adams.  But the most damning setback for the movement came after California launched a statewide whole language program in 1987, which it implemented over a nine-year period, only to land the state at the bottom of National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores in 1996.  The statewide whole language experiment, far from improving reading, put the Golden State behind Mississippi in national reading comparisons.  Bill Honig, the state superintendent of public instruction over the period, was so chastened by the experience that he public repudiated the very plan he had instituted—surely one of the few times a public official has admitted publicly that he had blown it.[xliii]

The corruption of mathematics instruction came in the 1960s with what came to be called the “New Math.” The professed purpose of the New Math was to place more emphasis on concepts as opposed to procedures.  Like whole word—or look-say, or whole language—reading methods, the New Math was entirely progressive.  It too would liberate children from medieval methods of classroom instruction.  There would be no more “drill-and-kill” memorization of multiplication tables and “boring practice” of long division.  Instead, students would be introduced early to more advanced mathematical concepts.  As a result, facility with basic mathematical operations was replaced with “the concepts and language of sets, algebraic properties of number systems, non-standard numeration systems, informal properties of number systems, and number theory.”[xliv] Once again the progressives ignored the order of learning, confusing it with the order of knowledge.  As Morris Kline, a prominent mathematician and writer who excoriated the movement in his 1973 book, Why Johnny Can’t Add pointed out, the proponents of the New Math were promoting an entirely top-down approach to teaching mathematics.  A method Bestor had earlier compared to trying to build a house “by starting with the roof first.” They really thought that the best way to teach the subject was by beginning with the abstract, rather than the concrete. “In every case,” said Kline, “learning proceeds from the concrete to the abstract and not vice-versa.”

The logical approach to teaching [Kline’s term for the top-down approach] is reminiscent of a reply that Samuel Johnson gave to a man who asked Johnson for further explanation of some argument he had given.  Johnson barked, “I have found you an argument but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.”

 Kline criticized the New Math approach for its deductive, rather than inductive approach, and for “the premature teaching of abstractions such as abstract algebraic concepts, linear vector spaces, finite geometries, set theory, symbolic logic and fundamental analysis…”[xlv] But if Kline was the New Math’s chief critic, he also gave the appearance of serving as its undertaker.  “By the early 1970s,” he declared, “the New Math was dead.”[xlvi]

But was the New Math monster—a Grendel terrorizing the educational mead hall, spawn to its progressivist mother—really dead?  Or had it simply slunk off to the teachers colleges to lick its wounds? 

With 1967 as the peak of New Math influence, by the mid-1970s it was driven out, followed by the customary interregnum of a more sober but merely ostensible traditionalism that always follows a progressivist binge.  And, as usual, it didn’t last long.  By 1989, the thing was back, this time in the form of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Standards (NCTM), with a program known among many educators as “Reform Math.”  But it soon became apparent that the NCTM authors, like the New Math proponents that preceded them, were intent on driving drill and practice out of schools again, only this time to replace them with “student-led activities, mathematical games, working with manipulatives (e.g. blocks and sticks), using calculators, and group learning…”[xlvii]  It also “discounted the importance of correct answers.” Again—like the progressivists of the 20s and 30s, who were replaced by the life adjustment movement—the meliorists were out, and the pragmatists were in, both being variants of the old romanticism:

The underlying approach of the NCTM standards was solidly grounded in the familiar principle of progressive education that learning should be student-centered, not teacher-led, and dependent on students’ activities rather than teachers’ direction.  The new theories of the 1980s were similar to the pedagogical thinking of the 1920s and 1930s but were called “constructivism,” rather than progressivism.[xlviii]

The sheep’s clothing was marked “Reform Math,” but the wolf underneath was the “New Math.”  Some simply called it the “New New Math.”  Again the torches were lit and citizen posses formed. They formed a group called “Mathematically Correct,” made up of mathematicians, parents, and citizens, mostly from California, where a particularly malignant form of mathematical progressivism had metastasized. One of the forms in which the constructivist math reappeared was in such programs as “Everyday Math” or “Chicago Math.”  These programs were tried in, among other places, Penfield, New York, which, because of the close proximity of companies such as Kodak, Xerox, and Bausch & Lomb, housed a significant number of engineers and scientists. In 2004-2005, they became the advance guard of the parent educational militia there. 

When in the spring of 2005 Jim Munch became the town’s top math student, the school district paraded him around as an example of the success of the district’s constructivist math program.  But it turned out that Munch, far from having benefited from the schools’ program, had in fact succeeded despite it.  “My whole experience in math the last few years has been a struggle against the program,” he told a New York Times reporter.  “Whatever I’ve achieved, I’ve achieved in spite of it.  Kids do not do better learning math themselves.  There’s a reason we go to school, which is that there’s someone smarter than us with something to teach us.”  One parent complained that she had taken her daughter to McDonalds for lunch and realized she couldn’t calculate the change from a $20 bill.  Another told the reporter that her daughter had to solve a multiplication problem by “counting 23 groups of four apples.” As it turned out, many of the parents in Penfield were taking their kids to Kumon to learn their math because of the school’s insistence on the constructivist idea that students should “construct their own knowledge” through their own reasoning process.[xlix] If the schools refused to actually teach them, they would take them to someone who would.

In 1997, the state of California abandoned the NCTM standards, and other states and localities have since followed suit.  “Reform math” still lives in the form of a new version of the standards was released in 2000, which was written to quell some of the dissent.  But the newer version still has much of the progressivist emphasis of the original. 

Other disciplines were longer in becoming infected with the progressivist spirit.  In 1994, the Goals 2000 program was inaugurated, and a federal board created to set state and national standards in various subjects.  The first set of standards came that year.  They were the national history standards.  But when they were released to the public, it soon became apparent that many of the left-leaning political and social goals of the larger progressivist movement had snuck in.  That fall, former National Endowment for the Humanities Chair Lynne Cheney (whose husband Dick Cheney later became Vice President under George W. Bush) issued a stirring and widely read condemnation of the history standards in article titled, “The End of History, published in the Wall Street Journal:

“Imagine,” she declared, “an outline for the teaching of American history in which George Washington makes only a fleeting appearance and is never described as our first president. Or in which the foundings of the Sierra Club and the National Organization for Women are considered noteworthy events, but the first gathering of the U.S. Congress is not.”  She went on to savage the document’s poorly concealed political correctness:

African and Native American societies, like all societies, had their failings, but one would hardly know it from National Standards. Students are encouraged to consider Aztec "architecture, skills, labor systems, and agriculture." But not the practice of human sacrifice.

Counting how many times different subjects are mentioned in the document yields telling results. One of the most often mentioned subjects, with 19 references, is McCarthy and McCarthyism. The Ku Klux Klan gets its fair share, too, with 17. As for individuals, Harriet Tubman, an African-American who helped rescue slaves by way of the underground railroad, is mentioned six times. Two white males who were contemporaries of Tubman, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, get one and zero mentions, respectively. Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk and the Wright brothers make no appearance at all.[l]

The authors of the standards consistently portrayed America in a bad light, and the country’s warts were exaggerated to the point where it seemed as if it had few other features.  But it wasn’t only the political agenda that so bothered the critics.  As might be guessed, some of the same educational philosophies plagued the history standards that seemed to have seeped into everything else.  UCLA historian Gary Nash, far from trying to douse the fears ignited by Cheney, seemed happy to throw gasoline on the flames.  The goal of the history standards, he said, which he had helped to formulate, “was to bring about nothing short of a new American revolution in history education … we want to bury rote learning and the emphasis on dates, facts, places, events and one **** thing after another.”[li] He invoked an unlikely vision of American students, apparently crushed under an avalanche of facts and dates, their minds overstuffed with knowledge.  It was the job of educators, he said, to “let children out of the prison of facts and dates and make them active learners.”

A national debate ensued, with the initial conservative opposition being joined even by liberals. U. S. Secretary of State Richard Riley washed his hands of the project, and by January of 1995, the heat had become so intense that the United States Senate voted to condemn the standards in a vote of 99 to 1.  Review panels were subsequently set up to correct the most egregious problems, but the taint of controversy permanently hampered the effort to implement them on any large scale.

In English too, the progressives attempted to eat away at the foundations of academics. But they picked a time when the public was on the alert.  In fact, the English standards were defunded almost in embryo.  As Ravitch puts it, they were an “unmitigated disaster.”  In 1994, because of a clear lack of content and standards, the Department of Education simply cut off funding.  The groups writing the English standards, made up of the educational establishment (now the permanent lair of progressivism), went on with their work under other auspices, and belched forth another permissivist document that purported to herald educational success by undermining academics:

The document buzzed with fashionable pedagogical concepts but lacked any concrete reference to the importance of accurate language usage, correct spelling and grammar, great contemporary or classical literature, or what students at any grade level should actually know and be able to do.

            Like the history standards, the document became target practice for critics across the political spectrum.  “[T]he standards statement,” said J. Martin Rochester of the University of Missouri, “essentially says we should not hold students to any standards!”[lii] Like the history standards, the English standards have themselves largely become irrelevant, but the mischievous influence of the philosophy that undergirds them lurks behind almost every program and policy invoked by the public school establishment.

At the end of the first decade of the 21^st century, the nation finds its education system not fundamentally improved in any important respect, and trapped in a matrix of structural impediments that prevent the implementation of any real reform.  Extinguished reform proposals lie about the educational system, to borrow the words of Thomas Huxley, like strangled snakes around the cradle of Hercules.  They don’t work for two reasons: the first involves the practical concerns of those who staff schools and state education departments.  For them, reform proposals serve a primarily cosmetic purpose.  In the face of what seem to be intractable education problems, they must at least look like they are doing something, anything.  And they know that, whatever reform ideas are now being implemented, they will be replaced by others, equally attractive sounding, which ultimately will have no fundamental effect. This at least has been the obvious pattern.

The second has to do with the ideological concerns of those who inhabit the teachers colleges.  The teachers colleges are the spawning ground for almost every bad education idea that has been devised in the past 50 years.  And they are the ones who train the teachers and administrators; they are the true believers of educational progressivism.  But, despite repeated experiments, their ideas have yet to prove to be workable (or wise). They seem incapable of solving educational problems probably becuase their philosophy lies at the heart of the worst problem plaguing schools: an anti-academic attitude that affects not only what courses are taught and not taught, but how they are taught.  If academic performance has not been improved in America’s schools, it is largely because those who fashion the proposals to correct the problem are not primarily concerned with academic performance.

The first thing that has to happen is for educators and the public to gain a clear picture of what schools are for.  And once that it is clear, they need to come to a common understanding of how to accomplish that purpose.  It became fashionable at the end of the 20^th century for progressives of all stripes to declare that we needed to “build a bridge to the 21^st century.”  But whatever bridge we plan on crossing should be to something better, not to the failed educational ideas of the past.

© Martin Cothran

---

[i]              Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (New York: Vintage Books, 1961).

[ii]              Cremin, p. 26.

[iii]             Cremin, pp. 26-27.

[iv]             Cremin, p. 28.

[v]              Quoted in Cremin, p. 30.

[vi]             Cremin, p. 31.

[vii]            Quoted by Cremin, p. 34.

[viii]           Paul Douglas, American Apprenticeship and the Industrial Revolution (New York, 1921).

[ix]             Cremin, p. 91.

[x]              Cremin, p. 101.

[xi]             Cremin, p. 101.

[xii]            Cremin, p. 103.

[xiii]           Cremin, p. 110.

[xiv]           Cremin, p. 112.

[xv]            R. W. Livingstone, A Defense of Classical Education (London: Macmillan & Co.), pp. 1-2.

[xvi]           Tracy Lee Simmons, Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2002), p. 147.

[xvii]           Simmons, p. 148.

[xviii]          Simmons, p. 149.

[xix]           Cremin, p. 241.

[xx]            Cremin, p. 249.

[xxi]           Cremin, p. 258.

[xxii]           George S. Counts, “Dare Progressive Education be Progressive?” Progressive Education, Volume IX, Number 4, April 1932, Pages 257-263.

[xxiii]          Cremin, p. 264.

[xxiv]          Cremin, p. 269.

[xxv]           Quoted in Cremin, p. 336.

[xxvi]          Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1977), p. 248.

[xxvii]         Life, October 15, 1950.

[xxviii]        Miller & Nowak, p. 256.

[xxix]          Quoted in Miller & Nowak, pp. 257-258.

[xxx]           Miller & Nowak, p. 259.

[xxxi]          Cremin, p. 343.

[xxxii]         Cremin, p. 344.

[xxxiii]        Arthur Bestor, “Aimlessness in Education,” The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 75, No. 2 (Aug., 1952), pp. 109.

[xxxiv]        Miller & Nowak, pp. 259-260.

[xxxv]         Quoted by Miller & Nowak, p. 260.

[xxxvi]        Cremin, p. 339.

[xxxvii]        Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. 387.

[xxxviii]       Ravitch, p. 388.

[xxxix]        Ravitch, p. 387.

[xl]             Ravitch, p. 385.

[xli]            Ravitch, p. 400.

[xlii]           Chall, p. 441.

[xliii]           “The Reading Wars,” The Atlantic, Nov., 1997.

[xliv]           The National Advisory Committee on Mathematical Education (NACOME), Overview and Analysis of School Mathematics, K-12 (Washington, DC: The Conference Board of Mathematical Sciences, 1975), p. 9, quoted in Terese A. Herrera & Douglas T. Owens, “The ‘New Math’? Two Reform Movements in Mathematics Education,” Theory Into Practice, v. 40, No. 2 (Spring, 2001), p. 86.

[xlv]           Morris Kline, “Logic Versus Pedagogy,” The American Mathematical Monthly, v. 77, No. 3, (Mar., 1970), pp. 280-281.

[xlvi]           Quoted in Alan H. Schoenfeld, “The Math Wars,” Educational Policy, v. 18, No. 1, January and March 2004, p. 257.

[xlvii]          Ravitch, p. 439.

[xlviii]         Ravitch, p. 441.

[xlix]           “’Innovative’ Math, but Can You Count?” The New York Times, Nov. 9, 2005.

[l]              Lynne Cheney, "The End of History," Wall Street Journal (Oct. 20, 1994).

[li]              Quoted in Ravitch, p. 436.

[lii]             Ravitch, p. 438.

Five Best Books on Classical Education

I frequently get the question from classical educators which books about classical education are the best. Here are my top five:

1. A Defence of Classical Education, by R.W. Livingstone, 1917. This book is written by someone who was a prominent classical educator in the days when classical education was the primary mode of education, but was being called into question by advocates of educational progressivism. He articulates the structure classical education as it was actually practiced in its heyday and the purpose that has always animated it.

2. Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin, by Tracy Lee Simmons, 2007. While Livingstone describes classical education from the perspective of having taught it, Simmons speaks to it from the perspective of having gotten one in high school and in his time as a graduate student at Oxford. Beautifully written and convincingly argued, Simmons discusses the history of classical education from the ancient Greeks to the colonial and founding periods of the United States to the fateful showdown in first two decades of the 20th century, when a rising progressivism unseated the classical education that had been the only kind of education anyone knew.

3. Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing our Children from Failed Educational Theories and The Schools We Need: and Why We Don't Have Them, by E. D. Hirsch. Hirsch doesn't call himself a "classical" educator, but his emphasis on the necessity of factual knowledge, the case for which he makes in Why Knowledge Matters, was an unstated assumption in the old classical education, and his insights into the genealogy of the progressivism that displaced classical education in the 1920s and the need to cleanse our schools of Rousseauian Romanticism that infects them in The Schools We Need is unparalleled.

4. Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, by Werner Jaeger, 1933. Written in a time when scholars wrote not for other specialists, but for an intelligent public. Masterfully explains the classical culture of Greece, with an emphasis on how it viewed education. Jaeger wrote two doctoral dissertations on Aristotle's Metaphysics at the University of Berlin: one in Latin and one in German. It was translated into English by Gilbert Highet, a legendary American classical scholar. One of the greatest scholarly works ever written. Its two sequels, are almost as good, and his Early Christianity and Greek Paideia  (1961), which focused on classical education in the Christian tradition, should also be read by classical Christian educators.

5. Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, by Jacques Barzun. I'll just state this bluntly: Jacques Barzun was the greatest pedagogical authority since Quintilian. He was also one of, if not the greatest humanities scholar of the twentieth century, and one of the clearest writers you could ever hope to read. One of the things that distinguishes him from most of the pedagogical thinkers who dominate modern educational thinking is that he actually taught students. In a classroom. His book Teacher in America, written in 1953 was considered one of the great statements of the principles of education. Begin Here is a collection of shorter speeches and articles he wrote later in the 20th century. Each is a model of clear writing and thinking about how to educate children. It's not explicitly classical (that term was resurrected only shortly after the last of these essays was written). But insofar as they deal with real education, they can be considered classical. An ideal first book to give to a beginning classical educator and a great one to give older classical educators to remind them of the common sense principles of their craft. Available free online.

For the 1,619th Time, No One Wants CRT Taught in Schools

Until about a couple of years ago, very few people had ever even heard of "Critical Race Theory," but today it is hard to find anyone who doesn't have an opinion about it.

Another indication of its influence is that it also now has its own acronym: "CRT." An acronym is not only a letter-saving device designed to simplify words that would otherwise constitute a mouthful, but, for some people, a thought-saving device allowing those who believe in whatever the acronym signifies to avoid the tiresome process of having to defend or even think critically about it.

Over the last year or so, parents have accused some schools, rightly or wrongly, of having taught, or planning to teach "CRT" in their schools. On the other side, there are those who challenge these claims. But, whatever you think of the anti-CRT claims, the defenders of these real or proposed or imaginary programs, rather than denying what their opponents claim is true have taken the strange position of saying that CRT is a pure creature of higher education (particularly law schools) and therefore could not possibly be taught in K-12 schools. 

I can understand the position that CRT isn't being taught in schools. I can understand that CRT is being taught in schools and that that is acceptable. What I can't understand is the argument that CRT is only a figment of parents' imaginations.

Their argument is not that CRT is not being taught in schools, but that it cannot be taught in schools (because it is specifically a program in higher education).

It's hard to argue with people who claim that what they are defending does not actually exist, but there you are.

What is Critical Race Theory?

Several ideas are associated with CRT. One is the denial that race is a legitimate natural or biological category: "that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour" (Encylopedia Brittanica, "Critical Race Theory"). 

Another is the goal of subverting all hierarchies it considers unjust, a belief that often takes the form of the subversion of all hierarchies under the belief that hierarchies are ipso facto unjust.

But the central idea of CRT is the idea of "institutional racism" "Critical race theorists hold that racism is inherent in the law and legal institutions of the United States insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans" (Encylopedia Brittanica, "Critical Race Theory"). 

One could argue that the idea of institutional racism preceded the formal doctrine of Critical Race Theory, but that is irrelevant to the point that this idea in fact permeates the theory.

"Institutional Racism"

In traditional terms it is hard to discern what the expression "institutional racism" could possibly mean. The explanations of Critical Race Theory by its advocates are often confusing, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the reason for this is that the people trying to explain it are themselves confused. 

Now there are only a few things that this could mean.

First, it could mean that there are people within the institution who are racist. If this is the case, of course, this problem is easily remedied: You find the racists and get rid of them. This is not controversial. Everyone agrees with it. There is no need even to debate this.

Second, institutional racism could refer to policies which have a racist purpose or consequence. Again, this is not controversial. Everyone agrees with it. Again, no debate here.

Third, institutional racism could mean that it is the racist history of the institution that makes it racist. But those talking about institutional racism don't want to go there, because it is the institutions they now control that would be the first casualties—all the elite educational education institutions, numerous media organizations, and at least one of our major political parties. If this was the meaning of institutional racism, then they would have to close down the institutions they now run, such as the Democratic Party. And, of course, that's not going to happen.

Finally, there is the idea that the racist outcomes of an institution's operations might constitute its inherent racism. But by this criterion, that would mean that the NBA discriminates against Asians, and that the NHL discriminates against Blacks, from which it would follow that both are inherently racist, which is clearly preposterous.

So, for example, law enforcement institutions can be considered "inherently racist" apart from any actual racists or racist policies (point #1 above) or any expressed intention or purpose of being racist (point #2), but simply on the basis of their past history (point #3) or the frequency with which Blacks are arrested as opposed to Whites (point #4).

It is not that I am racist or you are racist, now the police are racist or schools are racist or America itself is racist. Furthermore, you may be perfectly non-racist, but your membership in a racist institution implicates you in racism.

According to this central assumption of Critical Race Theory, racism can exist even though no actual racist person or policy exists.

The Shift in the Locus of Responsibility

This hypostatized view of institutions, a view which stipulates that they really constitute some kind of moral entity which we can praise or blame for its actions is in direct conflict with the traditional conception of sin. Although CRT advocates do not state this belief in theological terms, their doctrine clearly implies that the locus of moral responsibility does not lie in individuals (the Christian view) but rather in institutions (the postmodern liberal view). It is another rendition of the modern tendency on the political left to deny original sin.

Of course this belief is not unique to CRT, but is an inherent principle behind all left-wing ideology. This is the central thesis of Thomas Sowell's Conflict of Visions: The Ideological Origins of Political Struggles and a central theme in all of the writings of Russell Kirk: that the fundamental difference between ideologies of the left and right is the belief or denial of individual responsibility, a belief most explicitly stated in the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. Edmund Burke says this explicitly in his Reflections on the French Revolution.

In this respect, critical race theorists have changed the very definition of the sin of racism. It is why they will frequently deny they are accusing any individual person of racism when they accuse an institution of being racist (even though, admittedly, they violate this rule on a regular basis).

Because critical race theory asserts that sin resides in institutions rather than in individuals, its advocates believe that the means to social improvement is the reform of institutions rather than individuals. Instead of the old way of mitigating racism (as taught in my day) by simply teaching the Golden Rule—that we should treat others the way we want to be treated—some now want us to teach political ideologies in our schools that, rather than focus on individual behavior, teach that our institutions are, or even our very system of government itself, is evil. No need for the hoary old individualist Golden Rule.

In fact, the main target of Critical Race Theory is not racism at all, but rather whole political, social, and economic institutions, which are to be forced to accept the left-wing dogmas based on the rejection of Original Sin, such as that race and gender are social constructs that have no grounding in reality, a belief which involves a radical reassessment of human nature.

Critical Race Theory, in fact, has little to do with actual racism, but is rather a purely political belief designed to change society along ideological lines. It is not that everyone should be treated equally or given equal opportunity, but that everyone must be equal in every respect, even if such equality must be brought about by force. It is a romanticist view of society and politics that has its origins in the French Revolution, where radicals inspired by thinkers like Rousseau (a proto-critical theorist) attempted to force equality on a national scale, only to bring about social upheaval and violence.

All this is not to deny that education programs sharing this central principle of CRT don't also promote "consciousness-raising," and "self-awareness" about racism, often taking the form of a personal confession of being racist (whether or not it is actually true). In fact, it is not uncommon to hear advocates of CRT or its doctrines call on individuals to confess their racism ("A little self-reflection might reveal some uncomfortable truths—such as ways in which you might be having racist thoughts or exhibiting racist behaviors without even realizing it."--https://www.verywellmind.com/anti-racism-strategies-5069386), reminding one of the scene in the movie "The Killing Fields," in which Cambodian peasants are asked to confess their "pre-revolutionary lifestyles and crimes," except that, in CRT, you are not taken out after your confession and shot.

This inconsistency could be pointed to as a flaw in the conservative analysis of CRT—or simply seen as an inconsistency in CRT itself.

The CRT Label and the "Kleenex Defense"

Finally, there is the matter of the CRT label. Any time someone identifies some program or policy, such as the 1619 Project, as being an instantiation of Critical Race Theory, the defenders of the object of criticism immediately deploy the argument that Critical Race Theory is a program limited to law schools. The argument basically amounts to saying that something is not an example of CRT because it doesn't have a CRT label on it, even though it shares one or more of the central principles of CRT.

This is what I call the "Kleenex Defense": "It's not Kleenex, it's tissue paper." CRT is, for all practical purposes, a brand name, and the fact that advocates of CRT know what parents are referring to and act as if they don't is tiresome and disingenuous. It is an attempt to avoid the argument. Everyone on the left knows what is being said by parents who have a problem with programs that, in fact, teach the CRT doctrine of Institutional Racism. If you don't acknowledge this, then you're not an intellectually serious person.

Even if a school program that acts like CRT, looks like CRT, or talks like CRT, you cannot and must not call it CRT or (sigh) you are a racist.

Okay, lets call it "crt", without capital letters. Is that acceptable?

Whether you want to call it CRT or not, efforts to teach CRT's central beliefs, like the 1619 Project, directed by Nicole Hannah Jones (an activist  journalist, not a historian), and sponsored by the very liberal New York Times, would teach America's students that our country itself is fundamentally and inherently racist. 

The people who are sympathetic to CRT are now in full denial mode about claims that CRT is being implemented in schools or is being considered for implementation, and any parent who charges that it is (whether they are right or wrong) is a racist. 

But we know three things: 

• First, that the chief and most characteristic doctrine of CRT is the belief in institutional racism. 
• Second, that CRT is embedded in the very heart of the 1619 Project (https://neaedjustice.org/the-1619-project-resource-page/)—this is explicitly acknowledged both by self-confessed CRT advocates and promoters of the 1619 Project.
• Third, that the 1619 Project itself and its outside promoters are advocating that it be taught in K-12 schools.

So if the 1619 Project promotes CRT and the 1619 Project is being promoted for use in K-12 schools, then what exactly are people supposed to conclude?

The Republican Opposition's Gnostic Rebellion: Or, why McCarthy's opponents should stop acting like a bunch of liberals

Makis E. Warlamis

The failure of Kevin McCarthy to secure the speakership of the U.S. House certainly doesn't reflect well on McCarthy. It is his first test as a leader: can he secure the support he needs in his own party? If he can't win his fellow Republicans, how can we expect him to command leadership in a chamber in which the opposition party has almost as many seats as his own?

Still, the main problem is not the opposing party, but the opponents within his own party who, without any alternative, are preventing McCarthy's installation as House Speaker. The only alternative McCarthy's Republican opponents are offering is some ghostly political democratic ideal, some non-McCarthy Shangri-La which will allow them to legislate in peace and eternal bliss.

It's enough to make smoke-filled rooms look positively attractive in comparison--and themselves like a circular firing squad. They're going to shoot themselves in the hope that some of the gore gets spattered on McCarthy.

Why should McCarthy's opponents be expected to sully themselves with the course political realities necessary in a parliamentary body? Every time you hear a politician rail against backroom deals and behind-the-scenes coalitions and cross-party alliances, make a mental note that this person is either being completely dishonest, or simply doesn't understand how politics works. In the first case he cannot be trusted and will end up engaging in the very behavior he condemns as soon as he's out of earshot; in the second case, he is a complete innocent who will never be effective and should be sent immediately to a monastery.

The legislative process has been aptly compared to a sausage factory for a reason.

McCarthy is not perfect. No one disputes this. Both sides know it. The difference is that his Republican opponents offer, as an alternative to McCarthy, some kind of ideal the details of which seem to elude McCarthy's most ardent detractors--some sort of Trumpian Shangri-La, some unrealistic Arcadian vision of ideal politics. It is the spectacle of a bunch of self-professed conservatives championing what Thomas Sowell has derisively called the "Vision of the Anointed."

The chief characteristic of this alternative is that it is not McCarthy. Beyond that lies the unknown.

Note that McCarthy's opponents are offering no actual alternative to McCarthy other than people who actually support him. There is no alternative except some dreamy political ideal that is so perfect it cannot even be described.

Is there a Swamp in Washington? Sure there is. Can it every be completely drained? Of course not. Such political swamps have existed time immemorial. And to think they can be completely drained is to cease to be conservative because it is to cease to be in touch with reality.

The problem with this kind of conservative ideal is that it is not conservative. Conservatives are practical and realistic. They are not dreamy and delusional. They acknowledge reality and try to find the best ways to ameliorate it. In economics they adhere to a few bedrock realities, like supply and demand and reject the idea that you can spend unlimited amounts of taxpayer money and not ever have to pay it back. In social policy they accept the simple reality that there are two sexes and reject the belief that there are some 75 different genders, the exact number depending on the time of day.

They accept the idea of Original Sin and that life and politics will never be perfect. Delusional perfection is the province of the Left: it is the Left's job to deny Original Sin and to constantly be casting some unrealistic vision of perfection that everyone knows really does not and cannot exist.

If the Republicans really want to succeed as conservatives, they should focus on the amelioration of the imperfect not the installation of the ideal. The Gnostic Republicans now making a bold stand against reality should stand down and deal with things as they are not as they wish they could be. 

Bring Back Wonder Bread: The Dietary Industrial Complex and the Food Allergy Crisis

The other day, I opened my refrigerator to retrieve the cream to put in my coffee, only to discover that there was, in fact, no cream. Instead, I was confronted with oat milk. Someone had been staying at our house and there turned out to be legitimate reasons for it being there, but it reminded me of something I have been bellyaching about for a few years now: the current prevalence of food allergies.

It seems like every day I run into someone who has lactose intolerance, gluten intolerance, or a peanut allergy. Every food group seems to feature something that makes you break out in hives or restricts your breathing or sends you into anaphylactic shock.

You go to a restaurant and are warned on the menu that there is peanut oil used in the cooking of food;  you go to a coffee shop and are offered some sort of alternative to milk products; you must make sure you have something gluten-free on the menu of your dinner party to accommodate guests.

It's enough to make you hypersensitive to hypersensitivity.

I do not remember hearing of anyone with any kind of food allergy until I was in my thirties. Attending school in California in the 1960s and 70s (did I mention I am now allergic to California?), I cannot remember a single fellow student—elementary, middle, high school, college—who ever so much as mentioned that he was allergic to anything, other than possibly disco.

Movies and television contained no references to any kind of food insensitivity. If you watched "Gunsmoke," you never saw a chuckwagon cook offering a cowhand coffee with oat milk. Lucy never baked Ricky gluten-free cookies. The castaways on "Gilligan's Island" never complained that the bread was not gluten-free. And Jessica Fletcher never wrote about a murder committed with a dairy product.

I can just imagine what Ralph Cramden would have said if anyone had asked him whether he wanted almond milk in his smoothie (or, for that matter, whether he wanted a smoothie).

Did some weakness enter the gene pool over the last two generations?  What does it say about us that we are hypersensitive to so many things? Why do we all now feel like we must answer the question, "Do you have any food sensitivities?" with a list?

Has our food changed or have we changed?

I have a theory to explain this explosion of intolerances. It has to do with an underlying attitude about life that requires us to be intentional about everything, especially food. Food peculiarities have become a part of the modern obsession with the self. I realize that this will sound like I am demeaning those with legitimate food allergies, but I do think a lot of people seem to feel some kind of obligation to be allergic to something. In fact, it seems to be actually fashionable to have at least one food allergy. Not to have a food allergy marks you out as odd or anti-social. It is one of the things (along with exotic gender categories and colored hair) that we now think contributes to our uniqueness.

Having a food allergy today almost seems to be the dietary default position. We might as well just consider it a new party game to compare your food allergies with those others at your table.

Back in the Golden Age (defined as the sunny and superior period of history in which I grew up) you were expected to eat what was put in front of you and like it. And if you didn't like it, you pretended you did. No one asked whether the beef was corn fed: all we cared about was that it came from a cow. We never stressed about whether our vegetables were organic: We thought, strangely, that all vegetables were organic because, in fact, they were. By definition. Check out an old dictionary, before the biological definition for 'organic' was replaced by a dietary definition. If it was meat, or vegetable, or fish, it was organic. Ipso facto.

We did not consciously ask ourselves what we might be allergic to. Today, we are asked so often whether we have any kind of food allergy (I was asked twice just last week), we start to wonder whether we are in fact supposed to have an affirmative answer to the question and think it might be more polite to go along with it all and just make something up.

Part of the problem here is that we are way too aware of what our food contains. And we feel beholden to find out exactly how many calories, carbs, cholesterol, fat, sodium, and protein each spoonful contains. We now walk around (getting in our daily steps), with a running dietary count in our heads.

When I was growing up, food did not contain ingredients. A Coke was Coke. A sandwich was a sandwich. A twinkie was a twinkie. We did not think about what food contained or what went into its production. If people were trying to poison you, they would use poison, not genetically engineered corn. And if someone decided he was too fat, he would take the precaution of eating less. No one outside of the biology department at the local college had heard of carbohydrates or cholesterol. And if anyone had made mention of anti-oxidants, we would have wondered what an oxident was and why anyone would opposed to it.

Of course we all became morbidly obese and lethargic, but at least we didn't stress about it. Stress can kill you. Or so we are now told, although I try not to worry too much about it.

For health reasons.

And besides, we have exercise now to deal with the obesity problem. That was another thing we were innocent of back in the 60s and 70s. Then Jack LaLanne came along and ruined everything. Exercise. Don't get me started. It would require me to talk about Richard Simmons.

Then came the came the "health food" craze, which resulted in the catastrophic elimination of Wonder Bread. Wonder Bread was white, which as we all now know, is bad for a number of reasons. According to health authorities, when we eat white bread, the digestive system breaks down carbohydrate molecules into smaller glucose molecules which are then rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream via the stomach and small intestines causing blood sugar levels to rise resulting in the pancreas releasing insulin which triggers the absorption of sugar into the cells.

It's a wonder we survived at all.

In fact, we should ask ourselves why it is that, when everybody was watching the Wonder Bread commercials during the commercial break of the Andy Griffith Show and learning how Wonder Bread helped "build bodies 12 ways," at least no one was apparently allergic to half the food in the kitchen cabinet.

I wonder how much of this phenomenon is actually medical and how much is a dietary affectation.

The point is that we are all now slaves to the dietary regime which has solved the problem of people selling us unhealthy food by having the same people sell us healthy food, which, I'm willing to bet, is unhealthy food with a "healthy food" label on it. In fact, you can count on the fact that, if the past is any guide, everything we now think is healthy for us will one day be discovered to be fatal.

There are also the things which used to be bad for us that now, unaccountably, are good for us: Coffee, eggs, butter, salt, wine, beer, whole milk, chocolate, red meat. Twenty years ago they would have killed you. Now they are the secret to a healthy life. But that could change next week.

According to the dietary authorities, we are supposed to be eating beetroot, white kidney beans, bee pollen, whey protein, blueberries, vitamin B, and shark cartilage. Feeling low? Try ginseng, goji berry, grape seed extract, or green coffee beans. Vitamins have taken over the alphabet. There are probiotics, branched-chain amino acids, and glutamines. If aliens ever come to earth, these would undoubtedly be good things to feed them, since they all sound like they, too, came from outer space.

There are various specific foods that are supposed to be especially healthy for us.  I recently heard algae is all the rage.

Garlic is one of the most highly touted health foods. I understand it also serves profitably as a vampire repellant and my guess is that the scientific basis for both is about the same. In fact, the prevalence of dietary scams has to be one of our cultures least savory aspects.

Even water has not escaped the dietary onslaught. In the case of water they couldn't convince anyone it was bad for them, so they tried to convince you that it was so good for you that you had to drink lots of it. In order to get the full benefit of water you had to drink like a fish. Remember ten or fifteen years ago when everyone started walking around with water bottles strapped around their waists or dangling from lanyards around their necks? "Research" had "shown" that you needed to drink eight glasses of it a day. Then it turned out the so-called research did not really exist at all. No one could find the study that said you needed to drink eight glasses of water a day.

In the meantime, half your friends had died from drowning from the inside.

The irony here is that the original impulse that produced the health craze was a return to nature. But the Dietary Industrial Complex, instead of encouraging us to eat more fruits and vegetables, is now hocking products that "contain" fruits and vegetables. Why do we think that the most healthy way to eat healthy is to turn everything into a pill or a powder?

I have the revolutionary idea that we should eat healthy, basic natural foods when we're hungry, and drink water when we're thirsty. But that probably doesn't make anyone any money.

Our Royal Double Standard

I've always wondered what Queen Elizabeth must have thought of the modern world. She began her life as a member of the royal family with no clear path to the throne and probably no thought on her part that there would be. Then, through an event almost unthinkable in the world of royalty and in the world of that time—the abdication of a British sovereign—she became the heir to the throne, to which she succeeded upon the death of her father, King George.

In other words, it wasn't something she sought. Elizabeth didn't want the job. She didn't seek it; it came to her. I don't think it is out of the realm of possibility that she would have given it to someone else if she could have. Did it involve notoriety and glamour? Sure it did. But she seemed to be oblivious to this. For her it involved only self-sacrifice.

This is the thing about royalty that we moderns don't get: We think it is privilege, and in many ways it is. But that is far less to the point than the fact that it is not chosen. There is only one avenue to becoming a royal other than being born one and that is to marry one. That's the only element of choice involved in the whole process of royalty. We think that this makes the privilege royals have worse that the privilege of someone who, say, earned his privilege. But it seems to me that the case is exactly the opposite.

In fact, why shouldn't ancestry be more deserving of reverence than these other things? Who your family is tells us much more about your character than how much money you have, or how many people know who you are, or how many other people will do what you tell them to do. I'd have far more regard for someone who had "come from a good family" than for someone who had a large bank account or who had a popular TV show or who held a high political position.

Plato once proclaimed that "the state in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the state in which they are most eager, the worst." When it comes to choosing leaders, you want the person who doesn't want the job, not the one who does.

Willingness is a desirable qualification; enthusiasm is a definite deal-breaker. Our modern politics produces ten examples of this every day.

If privilege that is earned is better than privilege that is inherited, then why is it that we all subconsciously recognize that someone like Queen Elizabeth is infinitely superior to the boorish tech bro? 

We know what we really think of royalty because of the way we treat one of its members when he goes wrong. On the one hand there is Prince Andrew, who's close association with Daniel Epstein caused a stir a couple of years back. Underage sex is something we do not tolerate in any class, and there are a lot of legitimate questions about how it was handled.

But the high bar we set for the royals becomes evident outside of rare cases like that of Prince Andrew.

 

Prince Charles' fraught relationship with Diana is a case in point. They divorced. He cheated on her. She cheated on him. Megan Markle claims to have been ill-treated by the Windsors. The Charles and Diana fiasco, as sad and unfortunate as it was, is all fairly tame stuff in our modern, licentious culture, but it is a big deal because it involves the royals. What does it say about our attitude toward the royals that we hold them do a higher standard? We think the royals should act better because we think they are supposed to be better. Otherwise, our attitude simply doesn't make sense.

This is why Queen Elizabeth was such a big deal. She was a member of the nobility who acted nobly. She served as a model for the rest of us of what it means to be selfless, to do our duty, to be polite in the midst of social strife, to work hard, and to consciously be a model of what it is to live a good life—all the things we expect of royals as royals.

This is one of the reasons that we need royalty: so that we have something superior to look up to. That's the job of the royals and that's why everyone gets upset with they don't do that. They occupy an "office" in the way a priest occupies an "office": they take on a role and a responsibility that is, by definition, bigger and better than themselves. And if they behave badly, they disgrace the office. But the point is that disgrace is bad only insofar as it falls short of the dignity of the office. It's only because we think the office so good that we see the person who disgraces it as so bad.

If a president behaves badly, we call for the elimination of the president, not the elimination of the presidency. When we split an infinitive, it is our fault for splitting it, not the fault of grammar for prohibiting its splitting. If our steak is overdone, we blame the cook, not the cow.

In spite of all the calls now to reassess the necessity of the British aristocracy, when a royal behaves badly, it is the fault of the royal, not the fault of the royalty.

In addition, there is the flagrant double standard we democrats employ when we argue from bad royals to bad royalty. If the bad behavior of aristocrats justifies the condemnation of the aristocracy, then why doesn't the bad behavior of democrats justify the condemnation of democracy? For every misbehavior of a prince, there are twenty democratic scandals. I'll give you three corrupt investment bankers, two elected lawmakers on the take, and one chief executive having an affair for one divorced duke.

G. K. Chesterton was not much enamored of aristocracy, being a self-described "democrat." But he knew that the way in which we moderns had eliminated aristocracy was misguided:

Thus in the old aristocratic days there existed this vast pictorial symbolism of all the colours and degrees of aristocracy. When the great trumpet of equality was blown, almost immediately afterwards was made one of the greatest blunders in the history of mankind. For all this pride and vivacity, all these towering symbols and flamboyant colours, should have been extended to mankind. The tobacconist should have had a crest, and the cheesemonger a war-cry. The grocer who sold margarine as butter should have felt that there was a stain on the escutcheon of the Higginses. Instead of doing this, the democrats made the appalling mistake—a mistake at the root of the whole modern malady—of decreasing the human magnificence of the past instead of increasing it. They did not say, as they should have done, to the common citizen, 'You are as good as the Duke of Norfolk,' but used that meaner democratic formula, 'The Duke of Norfolk is no better than you are.'

The anti-aristocratic view has it that the nobility should be brought down to our level, rather than the rest of rising to the level of nobility. In making the king a common man we make it impossible to make every man a king. If we extinguish the nobility of the nobility then we have struck no great blow for the good things of this world. And, in fact, in replacing the inherited monarchy with the aristocracy of wealth, celebrity, and power, we eliminate the possibility of royals we can look up to, and leave only tech barons, reality TV stars, and political demagogues.

And whenever you hear a liberal casting aspersions on aristocracy, search around on the internet and find a recording of their cooing and fawning over the Kennedy administration, an administration which, for years, they openly called "Camelot."

There is a vacuum at the top that has to be filled. And if it is not filled with royalty, whose job is little other than to be a moral exemplar, then it will be filled by something else—hip hop stars whose lyrics advocate the abuse of women, sports stars who take performance-enhancing drugs, and politicians who say one thing before the cameras and then say exactly the opposite to their staff. 

The superiority of this new system is not self evident.

Chesterton attributes to Queen Victoria the development of Britain's unique form of monarchy, "in which the Crown, by relinquishing the whole of that political and legal department of life which is concerned with coercion, regimentation, and punishment, was enabled to rise above it and become the symbol of the sweeter and purer relations of humanity, the social intercourse which leads and does not drive":

By lifting a figure purely human over the heads of judges and warriors, we uttered in some symbolic fashion the abiding, if unreasoning, hope which dwells in all human hearts, that some day we may find a simpler solution of the woes of nations than the summons and the treadmill, that we may find in some such influence as the social influence of a woman, what was called in the noble old language of mediæval monarchy, "a fountain of mercy and a fountain of honour."

Had Chesterton lived to see the reign of Elizabeth II, he would have seen that Victoria's invention had not been squandered.

Knowing the Liberal Arts

There are many ways to argue. One of them is not to argue at all. This seems to be William Michael's preferred method. Michael and I have been arguing about the definition of classical education (sort of), and whether anyone but him has any business talking about it. His preferred method for making his case seems to consist of making an assertion (e.g. that I don't know what classical education is) and then repeating it about five times, as if, through brute assertive force, he can conjure a sound argument. This is a curious thing to see in someone who claims the exclusive right to talk about the liberal arts, since one of the liberal arts is dialectic (in its most general sense to include the arts of argumentation), the art of discerning and making sound arguments and using them in a discussion. One would be tempted to conclude that, given his claimed expertise in all the arts, he would have mastered this one.

Since he has continually failed to state his case in as a logical manner, I have continually had to restate them in order to be able to make sense of them myself. Michael claims that I do not know what classical education is and so I therefore have no right to talk about it. This claim takes various forms.

The first form of his argument (if we can dignify it by that title) is to reduce the traditional definition of classical education that has prevailed for over 2,000 years to a very specific definition of his own, and then to ask whether the person understands classical education in this way. If he does not, then he does not know what classical education is and is advocating "fake classical education."

In a recent comment on my blog he wrote this:

Have you studied the classical Grammar or Varro, Priscian, Alvarez or Lily? Have you studied the six works of Aristotle's Organon? Have you studied the Rhetorical treatises of Aristotle and Cicero? Have you studied Nicomachus on Arithmetic? Euclid on Geometry? Boethius' work on Music? Ptolemy's Almagest?

In other words, classical education, which he narrowly defines as the study of the "classical liberal arts" (he talks as if the sciences are not a part of classical education, although the humanities seem to be a part of his own curriculum) necessarily consists in the study of certain specified primary texts. Michael makes a number of hidden assumptions in his case. His first is that there are certain texts one must know in order to know what that particular art is. The assumption here is very clear: If you have not studied these particular works, then you do know the relevant art.

Let's just take the case of the liberal art I know the most about: logic. Under his criteria, all those and only those who have studied Aristotle's Prior Analytics know logic. Now this assertion can quite easily be dispensed with by merely pointing out that there are people who have not read the Prior Analytics who know logic, and that there are people who have read the Prior Analytics who do not know logic (Michael himself seems to be included in this category).

Having studied Aristotle's Prior Analytics (part of his Organon) is neither necessary nor sufficient for knowing logic. Being neither necessary nor sufficient, it cannot be considered a criterion for knowing logic.

The other relevant observation here is that no logic teacher in his right mind would study logic using the Prior Analytics as his text. In fact, I have never even heard of anyone who did this. According to Michael's reasoning this is exactly what should done, indeed the only thing one should do, since the purpose of logic instruction is an understanding (and facility) with logic, and the only way to get this understanding (and facility), he thinks, is by reading the Prior Analytics.

Now I know he will probably say that the Organon involves much more than merely the formal reasoning laid out in other works included in the Organon. Fine. The same is true of all of them, the material logic in the Posterior Analytics, the topoi in the Topics, and so on.

This is also true of his Rhetoric. I am a great lover of that work, and have written an instruction manual to help step students through it. But I would never say that it was either necessary or sufficient for knowing rhetoric.

And it is true in all the other liberal arts--Varro, Priscian, Alvarez, and Livy in grammar, Aristotle and Cicero in rhetoric, and Nichomacus, Euclid, Boethius, and Ptolemy in arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. None are necessary for an understanding of the relevant art. There are people who know these arts whose knowledge is based on primary sources other than these or on secondary sources. To say one must know these particular ones in order to know the subject is just archaism.

Again, if Michael wants to make a case for this, he's welcome to go right ahead. But, as I have observed, he avoids giving any evidence or laying out clear arguments for his positions. He relies on assertions to bear the entire burden of his reasoning.

I'd love to hear his argument that only by reading Nochomacus and Euclid can one know mathematics. My father used mathematics throughout his career as an engineer. He designed the propulsion system for the Nike Zeus missile, headed the payload processing program for the shuttle, was on several shuttle launch teams, headed the program that put the first three spy satellites in space, and was the sole author of the design specifications for the nuclear centrifuge. Some of this he did through the use of a slide rule.

I'm sure Michael could tell my father a thing or two about mathematics.

Is it either necessary or sufficient that one know Heroditus and Thucydides in order to know history? Or Homer and Virgil in order to know literature? Again, I love the works of all these authors, and I think they are very important to know, but to say that they are in some way essential to an understanding of the subjects they exemplify is just nonsensical.

I'll address next what is required to know the liberal arts. But for now let's just observe that Michael's argument (if we can call what he does as "argument") is entirely unconvincing.

Were Homer's Works Taught in Classical Schools? A Second Rejoinder to William Michael

Of the seven points William Michael makes in response to my response to his critique, one of the statements he makes is this: "There is no evidence of anyone ever studying Homer as part of any school curriculum in classical or Christian history." 

I'll have to hand it to him: he's doesn't pussyfoot around. He comes right out and says what he thinks. 

I have read this assertion about the role of Homer in classical education. I have read it again. I have tried to think if there is something I am not seeing. If there is possibly a shade of meaning I have missed. I have looked for another statement nearby that might mitigate the definitiveness of the statement. But, no. There it is, with no qualifications whatsoever. He really means it:

Homer was never a part of any school curriculum in classical or Christian history.

Now this is what, in formal logic, is called a "universal negative," that is, a universal denial. There is no case in which Homer was taught in a school curriculum. And the only thing required to falsify a universal negative is one case in which the thing denied happened. Just one. That's all it takes. But this statement is so at odds with reality, and there are so many examples and statements from historians of education that directly contradict it, that we need not settle for just one example.

So my first response is to simply point out that this statement is completely, utterly, and demonstrably false. And it doesn't take much to establish that fact. I simply walked into my library and pulled out a few books, all of which say exactly the opposite of what Michael claims here.

1. Homer was explicitly taught in the schools of ancient Greece

Let's start out with Greece, and with one of that civilizations most exemplary figures. Plato explicitly calls Homer "the educator of all of Greece" (literally, Homer "has educated" Greece). Now his famous critique of Homer in the Republic does not detract from this fact, but only enhances it, since it is very clear that Plato is pushing back against practices then extant in Greek education. He wants to exclude Homer's account of the gods (and the accounts of other poets) from the education system of his Republic because they portray the gods as acting badly and god he thinks it reflects badly on them, and that, since God is good, this is a false portrayal.

And not only was he generally the "educator of Greece," he was explicitly taught in Greek schools.

Athens, notwithstanding this [Plato's] expulsion, continued to learn Homer by heart, and this ancient custom was continued far beyond the Athenian age. Even at the close of the first century of our era there were Greeks in the Troad [a reference to Troy] who taught their children Homer from the earliest years [emphasis added]. In fact, from the Athenian age to the present day, the study of Homer has never ceased. (John Edwin Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship: From the Sixth Century B. C. to the End of the Middle Ages, (Cambridge: at the University Press, 1906), p, 31)

There is a scene in Aristophanes "in which a father, who believed in the old-fashioned style of poetic education," who is "represented as examining his son as to the meaning of certain 'hard words in Homer'." (Ibid, p. 32) "[F]rom the days of Solon to those of Aristotle, Homer is constantly studied and quoted, and was a favourite theme for allegorizing interpretation and for rationalistic and rhetorical Treatment." (Ibid, p. 37) In Sparta among the efforts to "cultivate their children's minds Homer and Hesiod "were recited and committed to memory (James Bowen, A History of Western Education: Volume I: The Ancient World (London: Methuen & Co, Ltd., 1972), p. 54).

"According to Plato, Heroditus, Thucydides and Xenophon, as well as Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Nietzsche, Homer was the educator of the Greeks, the theoretical founder of classical civilization." (Peter Ahrensdorf, Homer on the Gods and Human Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 2) The Sophists, says Sandys, "had naturally much to say of one whose poems formed the foundation of all education in Athens." "To be a Greek was to be educated, and the foundation of all education was Homer" (Ahrensdorf, p. 3)

Not only do we know that boys in Greek schools recited Homer, but they sang his poems. We even know what instrument was specifically used by students for the singing of Homeric poems: the lyre. (Sandys, p. 43)

2. Homer was explicitly taught in the Roman Curriculum.

The Latin poet Andronicus authored a Latin translation of Homer's Odyssey which was used as a "text-book" in schools when Horace was young. (Sandys, p. 169). 

And then we have probably the greatest educational mind Rome ever produced, Quintilian who puts it quite plainly: It is therefore an admirable practice which now prevails, to begin by reading  Homer and Vergil ..." (Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, (London: Harvard University Press, trans. H. E. Butler), p. 149) [Emphasis added].

3. The reading of Homer and other classical authors was part of the curriculum of European and early American schools.

The entrance requirements at the University of Virginia established in 1826 by Thomas Jefferson included "the ability to read Virgil and Horace and Xenophon and Homer, sight translation of Latin into English, and knowledge of basic algebra and plane geometry." (Stanley M. Burnstein, "The History Teacher," Nov., 1996, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Nov., 1996), p. 30) Other colleges of the time had similar requirements.

In other words, a reading knowledge of Homer was expected to already have been accomplished before entering the university, indicating that even secondary schools (at least the more elite ones) must have been teaching Homer. Jefferson also famously claimed that even American farmers read Homer, which is undoubtedly an overstatement. But the fact that he even claimed it is an indication that there were some farmers probably did, and that says something about the then current education in America.

At Yale the freshman class "read Latin out of Livy and Horace and Greek out of Homer, Hesiod, Sophocles, and Euripides..." (Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The National Experience 1783-1876 (New York: Harper Collophon Books, 1980), p. 404)

This education continued on at many English and American schools well in to the 19th and early 20th centuries, where schools were teaching the Greek and Latin poets, many times in the original languages. It is hard to believe that Homer, the chief of the Greek poets, was not represented in many, if not most them. This was still going on (and, in a handful of schools still is) in boarding schools when Simmons attended one. He can still hear him (I was there on one occasion when he did it) recite the first lines of the Iliad in Greek from memory. 

In have said nothing about continental European schools since the Middle Ages, nor of the education conducted in the Eastern Roman world, although there is evidence Homer was a part of the Eastern Christian Greek education. And Homer was not read in the Christian Middle Ages for the simple reason that the text was not available in the West, although the stories of Troy were available in a few other, secondary sources.

The only way in which Michael's claim could make any sense is if he is assuming a very restrictive definition of the term "classical Christian education." I have noted before that he seems to be assuming a definition that would confine the scope of classical education to some medieval iteration of it. And, indeed, on his website he commends to his readers a very specific version of classical education. It is the Ratio Studiorum of 1599, a Jesuit document which outlines in very fine detail how education should be done. "It is this very mission" he says about the document, "that we seek to serve and promote."

But here's the problem: P. 77 of the Ratio Studiorum, the statement that articulates the "very mission" Michael seeks to serve, contains, in the section on "Rules of the Teacher of Rhetoric," this passage:

The Greek prelection, whether in oratory, history, or poetry, must include only the ancient classics: Demosthenes, Plato, Thucydides, Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and others of similar rank (provided they be expurgated), and with these, in their own right, Saints Gregory Nazianzen, Basil, and Chrysostom. During the first semester, orations and history are to be studied, but may be interrupted once a week by reading some epigrams or other short poems. [Emphasis added]

In other words, not only is the study of Homer a common and customary practice in classical education in Greek, Roman, English, and modern versions of classical education, it is a stated part of the very kind of education that he himself recommends on his website.

But all that one needs to do to prove it wrong is to point the actual practice of classical educators and, apparently, to Michael's own website.

Look, I am sure that a student would get a very fine classical education at Michael's school. But to prowl around the internet casting aspersions on those who are trying to classically educate their students and calling what they are doing "fake classical education" when your own claims are demonstrably false is not going to help anyone.

The Definition of Classical Education: My Rejoinder to William Michael

My last post was a response to William Michael, who critiqued a short promotional video I did for Memoria Press called "What is Classical Education?" Michael then published a rejoinder to my post. 

He begins his response by stating that I "ignored most of the content" of his video. Yeah, well, when responding to a video that is an hour and eleven minutes long (responding to my puny five minutes), it's kind of easy to leave a few things out. So I responded to what seemed to be his major points. 

But he has now laid out his case in seven discrete points. So I will respond to each, the first three on this post and the others in later posts:

1. I "dismissed" my own video despite the fact that it has been viewed over 33,000 times. I think it fairly self-evidence that I was contrasting the length of my video (about 5 minutes) with his response (1:11 minutes). I was remarking, first, on the disproportion between the sledgehammer and the fly. Should it really take that long to refute remarks so few and so short?

2. I was incorrect in my criticism of his manner of criticism. In order to avoid the infinite regress involved in criticizing his criticism of my criticism of his criticism, I'll simply point out that he repeatedly criticized positions he falsely attributed to me before he even heard me out. 

Just go to the beginning of his video, where he stops the tape before I get more than two or three sentences out of my mouth, and goes through an extensive critique of the great books set behind me in the studio and telling his audience: "This is an example of what I am talking about. This idea of the great books. This is just modern gobbledygook book publishing, a cool product that you can buy, and, you know, it looks impressive on the shelf, which is why it makes for a good backdrop, but this is not classical education." Now let's remind ourselves that I have said nothing about the great books up to this point (three sentences in). And, in fact, never say anything about them throughout the entire presentation. He's literally criticizing me for something I never say, and doing it because he has not bothered to listen to what I say. 

Now I think the critique he offers of the great books is nonsense, and that his assertion that the great books do not have a part in "classical Catholic" education is just misguided, but to launch off on a critique based on what books are behind me on a set would be like me judging what he has to say on the basis of the white paint on the walls in the hallway behind him on his video. No telling what I could infer from this. 

I'm just glad he didn't notice the old map of Greece behind me. Imagine the lectures that could be made on the mistaken geography that has been corrected in recent times that I could be accused of perpetrating on children.

3. I made false historical claims about the education of the past. I made the claim that the kind of education I described--schools that focused on how to think and what to do (wisdom and virtue)--had constituted the education of older schools. Training students to think and express themselves well. He then says that this is historically inaccurate. And accuses me of not addressing this. Note that he says that that is historically inaccurate. Not proves. Not establishes. Says. 

He nowhere shows that what I said was inaccurate. He just asserts this. What am I supposed to do? Assert back? If Michael wants to make a case that what I said was false, then he needs to do it. But he doesn't. He just shakes his head and grimaces into the camera ominously and condemns this clearly preposterous assertion I have made that he does nothing to refute. And until he does, I have literally nothing to say because there is nothing to respond to.

All I can do is lay down the gauntlet and assert it again. So let me be plain about what I was saying, so he has a clear target to shoot at when he chooses to actually engage in an argument, which he has not yet done.

I contrasted this classical vision of education with the two other primary educational purposes: that of progressivism (the political/social reform impulse) and that of pragmatism (the preparation of students to fill jobs). In other words I articulated a logical division of education according to final causation--a definition based in the purpose of a thing--the kind of definition Aristotle considered to be the most fundamental kind of definition. The purpose of classical education is to use schools to pass on a culture and to teach individual students to be wise and virtuous; the purpose of progressive education is to use schools to change the culture and teach children to be social reformers; the purpose of pragmatism is to benefit the modern industrial economy by fitting children to it.

This general shift in the definition of education is quite well documented by educational thinkers like Arthur Bestor, Jacques Barzun, and Lawrence Cremin. It was what education was thought to be by most people before the turn of the twentieth century.

The purpose of education was to pass on a culture and improve human beings as human beings. That is admittedly a broad definition of classical education, but it is not false or misleading for being general. If we want to be more specific and historical we can say that it is the system of education whose purpose was to pass on the specific cultures of Greece and Rome. That is why it has always been characterized by the teaching of Latin and Greek, a practice some have considered essential to this enterprise. 

The term classical Christian education is simply a reference to that system of education as it was transformed by the dialectical clash between the cultures of Athens and Jerusalem negotiated by Christian thinkers such Origen, St. Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa in the East, and Augustine in the West. It was characterized by a dual emphasis on the liberal arts of grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, and the theological, moral, and, later, the natural sciences. It also added the great works of the Christian writers to its curriculum.

This is what is articulated in R. W. Livingstone's A Defense of Classical Education in 1917, when the great debate over the value of classical education was taking place, a debate in which Livingstone was the representative, and most articulate advocate.

If Michael wants to refute this, he's welcome to it. But let's dispense with the unargued-for assertions.

Next up: An analysis of Michael's assertion that Homer "was never taught in schools."

Is Homer Classical? A Response to William Michael

You shouldn't mind being criticized as long as the person doing the criticizing knows how to criticize. If he doesn't, then you feel obligated, not only to respond to the charges, but to point out what a bad job the critic did in trying to criticize you, which, admittedly, is sort of like giving the guy who is shooting at you lessons in how to operate his weapon properly. Good criticism should lead to some kind of enlightenment, both yours and the critic's; bad criticism only succeeds in making the critic look good--or, more accurately making the critic think he looks good--and alienating the discerning reader.

Several years ago, I taped a very short little promotional (around 5 minutes) for Memoria Press addressing the question of what classical education is. It has garnered some 33,000 views. It was a quick one-off, done to give people wanting to know what classical education is a brief, general overview. It was not intended to be complete, only accurate.

Now comes another YouTube video critiquing my five mine from a gentleman named William Michael, who runs Classicalliberalarts.com, which offers a classical education program. This critique of my 5-minute presentation clocks in at a little over an hour and eleven minutes. He indicates in the video that this is some sort of series he is doing whereby he patrols the internet for people who articulate false definitions of classical education and sets them straight.

His method for doing this seems to be to take a presentation by someone else which he has not reviewed beforehand, set forth his conclusions about the video before he even starts, and then interrupting to inject his opinion about what the person is saying before the person can even get it out of his mouth.

I hope he doesn't treat the books he teaches in his programs this way: judging them before reading them, putting words in the authors' mouths, and placing on them the worst interpretation he can. This is the worst kind of critic: the one who doesn't listen, who prejudges you, who has his own Procrustean bed into which he will put you, lopping off body parts or stretch you to fit--and who attributes to the person he criticizes the worst motives possible.

Straw men don't stand a chance against a guy like this.

Before about ten words get out of my mouth, he stops the tape, something he does constantly throughout his critique, sometimes cutting me off before I say something that, it turns out, actually agrees with the point he has previously made, not knowing that I was going to address the same thing. This causes him to repeatedly have to change tactics throughout his criticism when he finds out that I don't do all the things he has already criticized classical educators for doing, not knowing yet (not having ever heard me address this issue or any other) that I don't believe those things.

The first interruption happens when his attention is captured by a set of Great Books of the Western World that is behind me as part of the set on which we are taping. This provokes him into issuing a condemnation of the idea that classical education has anything to do with the great books at all. He takes his pointer and through each of the books behind me, exclaiming upon their shortcomings, which mostly consist of the fact that they contain erroneous opinions. Of course, the whole point of reading the great conversation is not to agree with everything, but to assess everything, and judge it as we may. But clearly Michael is not much enamored of assessment. Condemnations must be issued at the beginning of any critical process, and of what use is judgment and assessment and evaluation when the works have already been condemned?

Of course, the only real reason the books were there was an aesthetic one: they look nice and give a generally academic feel to the set. But we must not sacrifice a single opportunity to critique the least little thing even when we have not bothered yet to find out why it is there.

He continues by giving his viewer a rundown of the problems he sees in how people in the classical education movement define what classical education is. He gives a litany of common misconceptions and mistaken definitions that characterize the rhetoric of classical education advocates. He's correct of course. Classical education is mis-defined frequently. I have attempted to correct this myself a number of times.

When I tried to nicely point out in the video that the two most frequently used definitions were not the historic definitions (after he referred to them as well in his intro, clearly not anticipating that I would know and critique them myself (Oops.)), he has to change tactics. He seems surprised that I already know about them. So when he suddenly realizes he can't criticize me for using these definitions myself, he instead goes after me for saying that I "have no problem with these ideas," by which I mean that as ideas in and of themselves they are not necessarily erroneous. Although it is erroneous to say that classical education consists of stages of learning, it is not necessarily erroneous to say that there are stages of learning. Although it is erroneous to say that studying history in a certain sequence constitutes classical education, it not necessarily erroneous to say that history should be studied in a certain sequence.

But, as so often in his critique, he criticizes me for something I didn't say. He is too busy critiquing me for what he thinks I would say, but didn't actually say, and constantly realizes, in mid-condemnation, that I'm making the same criticism of these ideas myself.

He not listening.

I could go on, but here are a few of the criticisms he makes:

• He criticizes me for not going into detail on my sources. It's a five minute video, dude.
• He critiques a curriculum he's never seen. If he can criticize me for things I didn't say, why can't he criticize a curriculum he's never seen?
• After mentioning Homer, he asserts (without going into detail on his sources) that "Homer's writing was despised by ancient philosophers." (I think he is referring to Plato's banishment of the poets from his Republic. But not only is this misleading, since Plato elsewhere eulogizes Homer (so making that blanket statement is simply false, committing an error he accuse me of), but the study of Homer was by common scholarly consent at the heart of Greek education. If Michael wants to say Homer has nothing to do with classical education (which he doesn't say, but seems to imply), he's going to have to assume that Greek education was not classical, which is going to be hard to do because one of the legitimate definitions of "classical" is "having to do with ancient Greece." Classical is Greek by definition.
• He asserts, with no evidence (the kind he constantly demands of me) that I champion what I call "classical education" for purely pecuniary reasons (My wife would laugh at that one). I can only say that that's a poor excuse for an argument. The only evidence to which I think he could appeal is that I am doing a promotional video for a company that sells a product, but if that is all it takes, then it would be hard for him to avoid the same charge, since his own video was done in promotion of his own program. Physician, heal thyself.

I could go on. But I want to address one major problem with Michaels entire presentation, which is this: He assumes (never argues for, never gives evidence for, never specifying any facts in support of (in other words, all the things he demands of me in a five minute presentation, but is himself unable to do in his 1:11 minute presentation) that classical education is specifically classical Catholic education, specifically the education for Catholic vocations, and more particularly that education administered in the medieval universities. That is, at least what he clearly implies in his critique.

Now obviously it is indisputable that this kind of education is classical, at least when its being done classically, which, I hate to inform Michael, it frequently is not. But Michael seems to suggest that it is the only definition of classical education. And my response to this is simply to say (and I say it as a practicing Catholic) that that is almost as misleading as saying it as three stages or that it is a particular way of studying history.

The words "classical" literally means "having to do with the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome." Literally. In other words, his definition of classical education would exclude the education of the classical cultures themselves, and would include only the education that characterized the non-classical culture of the Middle Ages.

That's not only wrong, that's preposterous. He has demanded of me evidence that my use of "classical" is accurate. I can only point to scholars like Edith Hamilton, Werner Jaeger, Gilbert Highet, and R. W. Livingstone. These were among the great classical scholars, and they use the term as I use it, not as Michael does.

Now Michael has every right to use it this way (I "have no problem" with how he uses it--see above), but he has no right to demand that everyone use it in this narrow a specialized and largely unhistorical way. If someone wants to use it this way, go right ahead, but it will require a rejection of the common usage of the term as it has always applied to the European institutions that required students to learn Latin and Greek and study the works of the classical civilizations, as well as the American system of education that did the same in this country during the colonial and founding periods and that lasted in an increasingly weak form until the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was explicitly rejected by the progressives and pragmatists by its commonly accepted name (i.e., "classical").

I don't envy someone who champions a definition of classical education that classical scholars themselves do not use. But Michael can do that if he likes. I "have no problem" with it, except that it is quite simply mistaken.

Again, I don't mind being criticized, but I do mind when it's done badly. If it's done well, I can learn something by it and profit from it. But in order for that to happen, a critic should try not be needlessly uncharitable, he should be accurate in his criticisms, and he shouldn't commit very errors he accuses his opponent of.

Careful you don't get whiplash. Progressives are now against censorship again.

Censorship is acceptable when it restricts the free exchange of ideas, but not when it protects children from inappropriate material in a school library. 

In other words, they're kind of non-binary when it comes to logical consistency.

A Utah school district is removing a number of books that have little to do with the purpose of schools and at least some of which are clearly intended to familiarize children with the finer points of gender ideology, and the folks at Daily Kos are none too happy about it.

Utah school district removes more than 50 books from public school libraries, thanks to new law https://t.co/gUsuSifdaI

— Daily Kos (@dailykos) August 5, 2022

Among the books the elimination of which has scandalized the left-wing critics at Daily Kos, are Queer: The Ultimate LGBT Guide for Teens, This Book is Gay, and Two Boys Kissing. One of the books the Utah school librarian apparently thought was appropriate for children is Gender Queer, the same book Louisville parents have protested on the grounds (among other things) that it has explicit portrayals of two males, possibly minors, engaged in oral sex.

In other words, something that quite possibly constitutes child pornography.

No depredation dare stand in the way of the promotion of gender ideology.