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Critique of the American Institution of Education Richard B. Wells © 2013

Chapter 14 The 20th Century Reform Movements to 1950

§ 1. Historical Sources and the Educational Spectrum

I find these last three chapters of the Critique the most difficult to write. The reason is owed to a level of uncertainty I feel concerning the extent to which details in the history of education in 20th century America should be reexamined here. I want you to clearly understand that I am not saying the authors of these histories make serious blunders in reporting facts. But historians are people and, through lack of metaphysical grounding in a social-natural science of history, historians are as vulnerable to subjective judgments of taste as all the rest of us. This can color the lens of historical reporting when the subject matter is one that tends to be important to almost everyone in a Society. Education is such a subject. I know a lot of people from all walks of life and greatly diverse mini-cultural backgrounds, yet I do not think I know one single person who is actually indifferent to or apathetic about public education. I do know many people who are intensely passionate about it – probably more passionate than bodes well for its future prospects, In this study, I strived to identify the body of objective facts but also have had to ask myself, "To what extent must the Critical analysis of how this was done be reported here?"

Different historians view matters from individual perspectives. Those I regard as the most professional of its practitioners also take advantage of the comments, criticisms, and suggestions of other historians when they produce their historical accounts. History is the great fact-gathering enterprise of civilization. It is at the least the practice of a natural history if not yet a natural science, and its role can hardly be overstated. But because it is at present more the practice of a natural history than a natural science, subjectivism is always present to some degree in histories. In this treatise, I have referred to and quoted from those histories, or those segments within a particular study of history, that appear to me to be the most objective and the least affected by judgment of taste and the human-natural inclination to draw satisficing conclusions. The histories to which I refer are summarized in the reference section at the end of this chapter. Yet, though these represent the best efforts I have come across in my own research, few of them are without some evidential appearances of rhetoric warning the account might there become a bit colored and walk a thin line between objectivity and inclinations of partisanship. The only recourse one has to this entirely-human state of affairs is to follow the practice required generally in historical analysis of any topic: one must keep the parts of it that are apparently correct, discard the parts that are clearly erroneous, and set the rest down as matters for further investigation.

The topic of education history has the peculiarity that nearly all professionals who report on it are personally involved, in one way or another, in the practice of education. It is one thing to report on Queen Anne's War from the comfortable vantage of the 21st century; it is another thing altogether to objectively report on a subject matter that is also one's daily enterprise. The latter requires an abnormally higher standard of practice than does the former, but standards of practice are much more difficult to establish for a natural history than for a natural science.

I am confident you have long noted that I am not without some influence of partisanship as I write this treatise. Honest disclosure demands of me that I state quite clearly what exactly it is I am a partisan in the Cause of: I am a supporter of and advocate for the Idea of the American Republic developed in the founding days of this country, and of a Society and a nation in which the system of governance well and faithfully serves the six fundamental objectives of government (at all levels of government) stated in the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States: (1) to form a more perfect Union; (2) to establish justice; (3) to insure domestic tranquility; (4) to provide for the common defense; (5) to promote the general welfare; and (6) to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. That is my Cause. As for educational "-isms," I don't give a damn about any of them. They didn't work and are inimical to my Cause. But each

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Chapter 14: The 20th Century Reform Movements to 1950 Richard B. Wells © 2013

of them did contain, at one time or another, ideas and practices that are congruent with human Nature and with Order and Progress in a free nation dedicated to liberty with justice for all its citizens. We must extract from each of them those parts, and only those parts, that are correct and beneficial to our country, then toss what remains of the "-ism" on the trash heap of history.

One source in which there is no trace of partisanship is Johnson (1904) and there is likely a very simple explanation for this. In 1904 the 20th century conflicts had not yet begun and Johnson was merely reporting a history of a bygone era in American education with visible evidence of a degree of nostalgia coupled occasionally with fond amusement. There is also little to no evidence of partisanship in Blake (1961). Blake's little book is a series of historical time-lines with annotations of when some important events occurred and people of notoriety lived. It would be difficult to unintentionally interject partisanship in such a format. I think it is worth noting that Blake was assistant director for audio-visual instruction in the San Diego City Schools and wrote his little book as a learning aid for beginning students of education history. Alone among the collected authors here, Blake was not a college professor did not hold a Ph.D. He was simply a man who was interested in the history of education and made himself a scholar of it.

Reese (2011) examines educational history and how institutional changes reflected changes that were taking place in American Society at the time. The presentation is impartial although not without occasional wry comments. If Reese subscribes to an "-ism," it is not apparent in the book.

Angus and Mirel (1999) present a thesis that on the whole appears to be the outcome of care-ful and professional scholarship without ideology. Statements are backed up by statistical data and if either author had sympathies inclined toward one or another brand of "-ism" this is not especially evident in their book other than for some occasional speculations regarding the motives or psychology of particular players in the on-going conflicts in education. These few instances lead me to speculate that the authors are at least somewhat sympathetic to tenets of Essentialism, but if this is so it does not harm the scholarship in the book.

Bloom does not attempt to conceal his partisanship or the fact that his book is a denunciation of developments in higher education during and after the 1960s. At least this is honest partisan-ship because the reader would have to be dull-witted to not understand he was reading a protest. Bloom was, according to divers accounts, not a particularly patient man, or given to sugar-coating his statements, or one who was much concerned over whether or not others found his style abrasive. His book enraged surviving partisans of progressivism and reconstructionism, who retaliated by labeling him a "perennialist" – which seems to be the strongest denunciation in their vocabulary – and calling into question whether he was a scholar at all. Bloom's book is clearly a one-sided presentation, and because he too engaged in some amount of character assassination in its pages, I don't feel sorry for him when those he offended retaliated in kind. But saying that lessons from the past have pertinence for the present does not make one a "perennialist." His aim was to be provocative, and he obviously did succeed in achieving that aim. The weakness of his book, as I see it, is that Bloom did not offer to show us a way to follow in order that the problems he points out could be corrected. Anyone can denounce and criticize, and sometimes denunciation and criticism are needed. But for criticism to be constructive, there must be some positive follow up to the negative. Dutiful practice of science entails: (1) not ignoring what Bloom had to say (that would be type-α compensation); and (2) an impartial investigation of his charges to identify real causes of problems he correctly points out. What Bloom was attacking at root is a post-1960s trend in education others have called "multiculturalism." If there was one label – which there is not – that describes the faddish character of 20th century educational reforms, this label would not be it. Its practices abandon instruction that assistants learners in achieving Progress in their personal Personfähigkeit for fulfilling their Duties to the corporate Personfähigkeit of our civil Community. More accurate practical terms, in regard to its outcomes, would be anticulturalism or perhaps anti-intellectualism or perhaps even outlawism; but there is nothing "cultural" about it.

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Cubberley was a full member of the Progressive Education Movement in the opening decades of the 20th century, and his book is written entirely from the standpoint of progressivism. If one knows this going in, the partisanship, presuppositions and prejudices he exhibits, particularly toward minorities and immigrants, can be rendered harmless. If his or any other author's attitude irritates you, you can probably best deal with it and maintain your objectivity if you remember that neither a Moses, nor a St. Paul, nor an angel, nor a Buddha writes history books.

Hansen was likewise a member of the Progressive Education Movement. In his case, the biases he occasionally exhibits are evidenced in a few rhetorical remarks, by his persistent mis-use of the word "democracy," and his obvious reverence for an ideal of "liberal education." In the main, however, his scholarship is impeccable and his reporting of facts solid. His is an excellent work and the standard for assessing the outlooks of the Founding Fathers in regard to the sort of public education they saw necessitated by the novel form of Republic they had established. His own occasional interpretations are set out as distinguishably his own and not disguised in the form of an allegation of historical fact. Hence they are easy to treat as his and his book is cleared of all charges of presenting propaganda. It is perfectly permissible for an author to have opinions and to express his conclusions provided his reader can clearly recognize them as his and the author does not attempt to buttress them by presenting them as someone else's.

Potter's book is likewise a textbook case of professional practice. He examines the history of American education from many different perspectives and identifies whose perspectives they are. In some ways, his book is more of a textbook aimed at illustrating for students how to practice the use of history than it is a traditional history book. He devotes a 17-page prologue to precisely that subject. I have been able to identify very few presuppositions of importance embedded in the main text. The only mild concerns I have are: (1) it is unclear if Potter merely presents Brameld's taxonomy or if he subscribes to it; and (2) he does not distinguish between what is philosophy of education vs. what is philosophizing about education – and here my concern is that he apparently takes it for granted that these are one and the same or nearly the same thing.

Pulliam & Patten (2007) is a college textbook for future teachers rather than a 'pure' history of American education. As such, by the nature of its objective the authors find it necessary to set out what they regard as the most instructive examples, and they necessarily must present the subject-matter in its standardized current form. The need for selection and summary means that a higher degree of author preference must go into the composition of the book, and this cannot be done otherwise than through a mental process of judgmentation in which the role of judgments of taste is prominent. The book exhibits an unfavorable regard for essentialism and speaks for modern progressivism. One must keep in mind that disciplinary paradigmatic teaching and not history per se is the objective of this book. Its statements are easily cross-checked; doing so is necessary.

If the book has a weakness, this is found in the second chapter, which presents the 'educational philosophy' paradigm, critiqued in chapter 13, as a given. This, however, is congruent with what teachers of a discipline are expected to do, namely to teach that discipline. The teacher-training discipline purchases its understanding of philosophy from an outside vendor, specifically, a philosophy department. If the product purchased is flawed, it is the responsibility of the vendor to correct this. No discipline operating with public funds is granted a license to exist as an island universe cut off from all the other disciplines, or to take public money and do as it pleases with it, least of all philosophy or teacher-training. Public funding is not a hog trough.

Ravitch (2000) examines education history from the perspective of educational reforms, policies, reformers, and programs. Because of the tone of Ravitch's rhetoric, e.g. pages 16-18, and her occasional use of statistics that are somewhat misleading, I regard the book as a not-impartial treatment of the subject. Its presentation seems to favor an essentialist viewpoint. Consequently, it must also be used with precautions and crosschecks. Ravitch counterbalances Pulliam & Patten.

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Figure 14.1: The socio-practical spectrum of public instructional education in comparison with the socio-

political spectrum and Brameld's taxonomy of education theories.

Some writers of education history, e.g. Cubberley, write from the perspective of the discipline of educators-of-educators, i.e., from the perspective of people engaged in the development of education theory. Others, e.g. Reese or Angus & Mirel, write from the perspective of history as a discipline, i.e., from the perspective of professional history-reporting. The latter group tends to be less tied than the former to theoretical constructs such as Brameld's taxonomy. Professional education theorists tend to employ or embed theoretical constructs in their historical accounts to a significantly more notable degree. Professional historians, by contrast, tend to view education history in a manner that more directly ties the character of the institution to the socio-political spectrum of opinions and views found in the broader Society. The difference in perspective leads to differences in how the same historical events are interpreted.

Figure 14.1 illustrates this in regard to the socio-practical spectrum of public instructional education vs. the spectrum of education theory. Brameld's taxonomy distinguished four classes of "educational beliefs"; these "belief classes" correspond to the four most popular "-isms" favored by the 20th century educators. In contrast, although Reese and others do not attempt to present a formal taxonomy, study of the histories written from the pure historian's perspective tends to show a five-fold set of logical divisions closely aligned to the socio-political spectrum of opinions. The difference between Brameld's four-fold logical taxonomy of "beliefs" and the five-fold logical division of education institution from the perspective of the practical character of the institution is both significant and important. In Brameld's taxonomy, the restorative-transmissive half of the spectrum and the moderative-innovative half are mutually negative with respect to each other. What I mean by this is that, e.g., the Brameld transmissive "belief system" and the Brameld moderative "belief system" are such that effects of efforts by one group of believers act so as to cancel the effects of efforts by the other group. The relationship between the two groups is inherently one of real opposition (Entgegensetzung) and the resultant of efforts by the two groups has the Quality of real antagonism (Widerstreit). There is no common ground here and reform efforts by opposing "belief groups" cannot yield a stable equilibrium but, rather, can only lead to cancellation of each other's efforts and a chronic state of social disturbance (lack of social equilibrium). Here is the classic Toynbee symptom of social breakdown. It is a direct consequence of reforms grounded in ontology-centered theoretical suppositions and the adult moral realism characteristic of the behaviors of the major 20th century "belief groups" or "-isms."

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Basing reform on the now-traditional education speculations and theories tends to leave the overarching consideration of the real interests of the civil Community (to whom the instituted public education system belongs) out of the specific aims of the opposing groups. When the reforms are viewed from the perspective of practical divisions of the institution's character, what is made evident through this perspective is that there are five non-antagonistic possibilities for the institution, each one of which corresponds to the character of present social needs. What I mean by this is the following. In times of domestic tranquility and the absence of Toynbee challenges, the education institution is in an equilibrium condition with: (1) moderate changes occasionally taking place to assimilate new social conditions; and (2) moderate innovations occasionally being put into practice to accommodate social perturbations. When assimilation and accommodation are thus in balance with each other, the outcome is an institutional equilibrium suitable for preserving Order in the Society but still plastic enough to allow for its gradual Progress. In figure 14.1 this is what is denoted as "liberal education." This technical term requires further explanation because the phrase "liberal education" was so heavily embroiled in propaganda campaigns during the 20th century that it became associated in many people's minds with strictly political connotations that distort its role in the civil objectives of the institution of public instructional education.

In Critical applied metaphysics liberal education means institution of a system of education designed with the purpose of developing personal tastes and tenets of cooperation in such a way as a civil Community deems desirable. The adjective 'liberal' used in this terminology descends from the Latin liberalis: of or pertaining to a free man. This has nothing to do with any political ideology or even with specific educational curricula. Its pertinence and meaning is tied instead directly to understanding the terms and conditions of a Society's social contract. This is a very different connotation from the usual dictionary one, i.e., "a general extensive education not necessarily preparing the student for any specific profession." Hutchins almost got, but did not entirely get, the practical connotation of 'liberal education' stated correctly when he wrote,

The aim of liberal education is human excellence, both private and public . . . Its object is the excellence of man as man and man as citizen. It regards man as an end, not as a means; and it regards the ends of life, not the means to it. For this reason it is the education of free men. . . .

Liberal education seeks to clarify the basic problems and to understand the way in which one problem bears upon another. It strives for a grasp of methods by which solutions can be reached and the formulation of standards for testing solutions can be proposed. [Hutchins (1952), pg. 3]

Where Hutchins erred was in making the identification of liberal education dependent upon the presence of specific elements in a curriculum. He contended there was a time in American history when "liberal education was the education of the Founding Fathers." Historical evidence contradicts this when one seeks and fails to find when curricular elements Hutchins identifies as "the method of liberal education" were present in the American institution of education. His view of 'liberal education' was object-oriented – which is to say it was ontology-centered – but the Object of liberal education is a practical Object and its objective significance is epistemological, not ontological. Liberal education is not defined by, e.g., books but, rather, by what Hutchins called its "aim"; the aim provides specifications for the books; the books do not specify the aim.

In a scientific practice of educating, the contingent nature of human experience and the basic satisficing character of human decision-making and reasoning will always from time to time lead to either excesses in educational practices or deficiencies in the effectiveness of practices that challenge the institution beyond its normal range of equilibrium. When (not if) this occurs, the restoration of civil equilibrium will sometimes require restorative efforts to roll back discovered excesses (restorative education), and will sometimes require new innovations in curricula and

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methods (innovative education). The left-most and right-most ends of the socio-practical ed-ucation spectrum recognize that counter-revolutionary measures (repeal of innovative excesses) and revolutionary measures (the invention of radically new methods and curricula) are occasionally necessary to ensure the overall maintenance of Order and the overall achievement of Progress in the Personfähigkeit of a Society in the presence of Toynbee challenges. Rather than Brameld's spectrum of theories-in-conflict, it is the practical spectrum of the institution of public instructional education that provides a proper Critical standard for evaluating the institution. This is, consequently, the idea of the standard by which the 20th century reforms are critiqued in this chapter. When the standard is not met, I'm not going to soft-pedal reporting the shortcomings.

§ 2. Overview of the 20th Century Reform Timeline

The turmoil of the 20th century conflicts in public instructional education was so increasingly chaotic as the century progressed that it becomes a challenge to present a general picture of this period in American history. Furthermore, the educational reforms over which the battles were fought cannot be considered separately and in isolation from the economic history of the century. That is why this treatise devoted so much space to the economic picture of America in the 20th century: to see where reform took us. Figure 14.2 presents approximate timelines when the divers movements took place. The century can be roughly divided into three major logical sections.

Figure 14.2: Approximate timeline for education reform movements in the 20th century. Starting and ending dates are approximate. Dashed lines denote: (1) non-organized continuations of reform efforts

following the breakdown of recognized major formal reform movements; (2) counter-reactions opposing one or more of the former; or (3) movements by citizen factions reflecting an onset of Toynbee proletariat

formation. Some of these non-organized movements are carried out by persons sympathetic to the PAPE of a predecessor movement. Others enlist persons who are responding to personal equilibrium disturbances

with maxims grounded in pseudo-metaphysics prejudices. In all cases these reform proposals contain little else than ad hoc quack remedies favored by ad hoc political factions. These are abetted temporarily by organized political Party politicians. The latter seek to exploit factional prejudices and the anti-bonding relationships between factions as means of serving non-educational interests of their particular political

Party. In all cases, dashed-line movements are characterized chiefly by propaganda campaigning.

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I compiled figure 14.2's timeline from the histories contained in the references described in the previous section. These sources contain a great mass of detailed data on events and those most directly involved in them. Although in some particulars these historians see some events from slightly different perspectives and draw slightly different inferences in regard to causative factors, on the whole they are remarkably homogeneous in their reporting of observed events. This is, of course, what one expects to find when historical research has been carried out carefully and with a high degree of scholarly competence and impartiality.

In this treatise I do not attempt to repeat details already competently reported. They are amply provided in the sources cited. Any useful recapitulation I might attempt in this treatise would merely add several more chapters and accomplish little else than redundant reporting of the detailed history already provided and accessible for your own review. What I do intend to provide in this treatise is a non-redundant Critical assessment of events as this must be scientifically carried out in a unified context of human Nature, mental physics, and the American social contract. When I think plain-speaking is essential for future reform, I state my findings bluntly.

The three major logical divisions in the 20th century timeline are: (1) the period covering epochs M1 through M3 (chapters 10-11), which I call "the rulership of academic educologists"; (2) a period of challenge approximately placed from around 1946 to 1968; and (3) a period of break-down from around 1968 to the present day. You will note that period 2 closely corresponds in time to epoch M4 (chapter 11) and the breakdown period closely corresponds to epoch M5.

Within the body of the timeline are seven interlocked thematic factors contributing to overall civic breakdown in the institution of American public instructional education. These factors are: (1) a reformation of American higher education from 1890 to 1910 that prepared the groundwork for subsequent disastrous innovations; (2) PAPE fanaticism by professional administrators and educologists that led to perversions of the purpose of institutionalized public instructional educa-tion; (3) establishment of uncivil curricula in the public schools; (4) counter-reactions by members of the public; (5) uncivic rulership by political party factions at state and national levels; (6) ad hoc speculative policy development without efforts to establish a social-natural scientific basis for instructional education practices and policies; and (7) Taylorism.

§ 3. Higher Education

It is probably more accurate to regard the period from 1890 to 1910 as the second phase of a revolution in higher education (with its first phase beginning in 1865) than it is to regard it as a second revolution. If so, this mirrors the point of view that the industrial revolution in America was a second phase of what the earlier Economy revolution had begun. Veysey called the period from 1890 to 1910 a "turning point" for higher education rather than a "revolution" in higher education. He wrote,

The two most important types of academic conflict in the late nineteenth century were over the basic purpose of the new university and over the kind and degree of control to be exerted by the institution's leadership. The first of these issues was dominant from the Civil War until about 1890. . . . Arguments tended to center upon definitions of the proper nature and function of the university and were maintained in fairly abstract terms. Then, beginning in the nineties, the emphasis of the dispute shifted to a concern over academic administration, as factions appeared in response to the tightening executive policies of the institution. The battles which determined the fundamental direction of American higher education were fought first along the lines of competing academic goals, then over questions of academic command. [Veysey (1965), pg. viii]

Prior to the higher education reformations of the Gilded Age, American higher education was

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regarded by educators and governing boards of college trustees as primarily an institution for moral Order in Society and as an institution for training up the next generation of elites destined to exercise benevolent rule over their fellow citizens. This was rather literally a shepherd-and-the-sheep mindset because it presumed the benevolence of the ruling elite would flow from religious convictions college education was to develop and hone – specifically, from Protestant Christian religious convictions. The unquestioned presupposition of rulership was utterly at odds with the principle of civic liberty in self determination that had grounded the American Ideal of a free Republic. There is a difference between the reform paradigm and what Jefferson wrote that the objects of higher education applicable to all students in every particular should be, namely,

To form the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend; To expound the principles and structures of government, the laws which regulate the intercourse of nations, those formed municipally for our own government, and a sound spirit of legislation, which, banishing all arbitrary and unnecessary restraint on individual action, shall leave us free to do whatever does not violate the equal rights of another; To harmonize and promote the interests of agriculture, manufactures and commerce, and by well informed views of political economy to give a free scope to the public industry; To develop the reasoning faculties of our youth, enlarge their minds, cultivate their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue and order; To enlighten them with mathematical and physical sciences, which advance the arts, and administer to the health, the subsistence, and comforts of human life; And generally, to form them to habits of reflection and correct action, rendering them examples of virtue to others, and of happiness within themselves. [Jefferson (1818), pp. 334-335]

Although it was no longer accurate to say higher education was preparation for the ministry, as it was in the 18th century, it is nonetheless accurate to say a PAPE that can be called Protestant Perennialism dominated the attitudes of professors and administrators for the first half of the 19th century. Hutchins called 1900 to 1925 the era of "the classical dissectors and drillmasters" [Hutchins (1952), pp. 27-29], but he erred in thinking that there was ever an earlier period in American higher education when this label would not somehow have been applicable. The education he described as that of the Founding Fathers never was part of any formal institution of higher schooling. The admirable traits he ascribes to it and credits to the Great Books was real enough, but it was the product of educational Self-development activities, not formal schooling. His label does, however, aptly describe higher education prior to 1865 and, to a lesser degree, a fraction of it still extant from 1890 to 1910. It is not, however, either fair or accurate to say it applied to educators like Royce. It is not surprising, then, that higher education was not looked upon with favor by the majority of American citizens. To the extent it can be correctly said that a single PAPE ever exercised sole domination of the institution of American higher education, this can be said of the period prior to 1865.

The first phase of the higher education revolution from 1865 to 1890 took as its theme an idea of utility. Of Jefferson's six objects of higher education, Protestant Perennialism failed to provide for the second through fifth Jeffersonian objects. It was argued the reforms of the first phase addressed all these omissions, but in fact they promoted only the third and fifth objects, mainly through the innovation of the elective system (whereby a student had choices in the subject matter he undertook to study) and the promotion of education in the technical arts (natural science and engineering). The second phase, 1890 to 1910, undertook to establish a reorganization of higher education. It was the product of this undertaking that turned the institution into a non-civil agency. Because professors from the agencies of higher education played a dominant role in all later reforms, this misorganization and failing to meet the last two objects were partial causes of the failure of the other education reforms in primary and secondary public instructional education.

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Figure 14.3: Number of 4-year colleges, enrollment (in thousands), and enrollment as percent of 18- to 24-year olds from 1880 to 2010. C = number of 4-year colleges; E = enrollments in thousands; P = enrollment as percent of 18- to 24-year-olds. Sources: Bureau of the Census (1976), H 689-693, 700, 706; U.S. Census

Bureau (2011) tables 7, 278.

It can be accurately said that the first phase of the higher education reform, the utility phase, was successful. In 1880 only 1.6% of 18- to 24-year-old Americans went on to college. Just as the second phase of reform was getting underway, college attendance began a boom period that lasted from 1890 to 1980 (with a brief interruption due to World War II). Figure 14.3 graphs the number of 4-year colleges, enrollments, and enrollments as a percent of 18- to 24-year-olds in the 20th century. One should bear in mind that, of the total number of American higher education institutes, only a minority consists of large universities (i.e., higher education institutes comprised of multiple special colleges). The rest consists of smaller universities and small colleges, some public and some private. The large universities stand in relationship to the smaller universities and colleges in much the same relationship that large cities bear to the rest of the smaller urban and rural communities. Most of the innovations in the reorganization of higher education came from the large universities, and the smaller institutes for the most part copied what the larger schools did either all or in part. To put this in perspective, in Fall 2009 there were 296 institutes of higher education with enrollments of 10,000 students or more out of 1813 institutes total (these figures exclude specialized institutes and 2-year institutes). Of these large institutes, 270 were public institutes of higher education. The largest institutes accounted for 19.4% of the total number of institutes. They accounted for 65.6% of total higher education enrollments [Snyder and Dillow (2011), table 244].

Reliable equivalent figures from the beginning of the 20th century are not easily found and might not be available at all, but it is beyond reasonable doubt that the number of trend-setting universities was a very small percentage of the institutes in existence at that time. The institutes most prominently involved were Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Clark, Cornell, Michigan, Chicago, and Wisconsin. Other institutes with some notable presence in the reformation included Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and California. Although it is by no means true that all the leadership for innovative reform in American higher education came from university and college presidents, there were five university presidents who greatly influenced the course of events from 1868 to 1910: Charles W. Eliot at Harvard (president from 1869 to 1909), Andrew D. White at Cornell (1868-1884), Daniel C. Gilman at Johns Hopkins (1877-1901), Stanley G. Hall at Clark (1889

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forward), and James B. Angell at Michigan (1871-1909).

Veysey wrote,

By 1910 the structure of the American university had assumed its stable twentieth century form. . . . Few new ideas have been advanced on the purpose of higher education since 1900, and there have also been few deviations in its basic pattern of organization. . . .

Looking back, it could be seen that the decade of the nineties witnessed the firm development of the American academic model in almost every crucial detail. Again and again the first widespread occurrence of a particular academic practice may be traced to those years, usually after preliminary pioneering by one or two institutions during the [eighteen] seventies and eighties. The precedents that came into wide adoption in the [eighteen] nineties proved all but irrevocable.

One may well pause to ponder this rapid stylization of institutional relationships. Before 1890 there had been room for decided choice about paths of action; there had been academic programs which differed markedly from one another. . . . During the nineties in a very real sense the American academic establishment lost its freedom. To succeed in building a major university, one now had to conform to the standard structural pattern in all basic respects . . . A competitive market for money, students, faculty, and prestige dictated the avoidance of pronounced eccentricities. Henceforth initiative had to display itself within the lines laid down by the given system. [Veysey (1965), pp. 338-340]

Toynbee's term for a Society answering to a description like this was an arrested civilization:

Once a civilization is born, and provided it is not nipped in the bud, as has been the fate of what we have called the abortive civilizations, may not its growth be expected as a matter of course? . . . The answer is that some do not [grow]. In addition to the two classes already noticed, developed civilizations and abortive civilizations, there is a third, which we must call arrested civilizations. It is the existence of civilizations which have been kept alive but failed to grow that compels us to study the problem of growth . . .

All these arrested civilizations have been immobilized in consequence of having achieved a tour de force. They are responses to challenges of an order of severity on the very border-line between the degree that affords stimulus to further development and the degree that entails defeat. [Toynbee (1946), pp. 164-5]

Two characteristics, common to all these arrested societies, stand out conspicuously – caste and specialization; and both these phenomena can be embraced in a single formula: the individual living creatures which each of these societies embraces are not all of a single type but are distributed among two or three markedly different categories. [ibid., pg. 181]

The characteristics of caste and specialization are both highly descriptive of an American institute of higher education. In one sense, caste was always present even if originally it was only presented as a caste of faculty and a caste of students. The caste system has diversified since then and is now additionally represented by an administration caste and college- and profession-based castes, notably those called the humanities, the social sciences, the physical-natural sciences, engineering, business, education (the descendent of the normal schools), and 'the professions' of law, medicine, dentistry, and veterinary medicine. In addition, there is a caste system in the various academic ranks and designations, e.g.: professor vs. associate professor vs. assistant professor vs. instructor; teaching faculty vs. research faculty; regular faculty vs. graduate faculty; tenured and tenure-track faculty vs. non-tenure-track faculty; etc. The multiplication of castes is traceable directly to specialization in the institution of higher education.

Specialization developed from 1890 to 1910, and it was this development that most directly

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led to American institutes of higher education becoming arrested mini-Societies. It is obvious that higher education mini-Societies, individually and collectively, managed to achieve a state of Order for themselves. The institutes are still here more than a century later and are, at least for now, sustaining themselves. But they did not become agencies of Progress either for themselves or for the greater Community whose property they are. An arrested institution cannot make itself an agent of Progress for the Community it is established to serve. But, because of the Enterprise protein structure of a Society's corporate tangible Personfähigkeit, it can became an agent of arrested development in the greater Society of which it is a part, and this is the case for the 20th century American institution of higher education.

It is possible for an arrested civilization to long endure. The premier example of this is found in the case of the BaMbuti Pygmies, who may well be the oldest civilization on earth. But it is more often the case that arrested civilizations become fallen civilizations. Toynbee documented five specific arrested civilizations in his study of history. Of these, four no longer exist.

To understand how it came to pass that American higher education became arrested, and how it likewise came to exert a dominate role in the development of the internecine PAPE conflicts of 20th century public instructional education speculation, there are five interlocking contributing factors that must be examined. These are: (1) the 'utility' movement; (2) administrative feudalism governing through the bankrupt practice of Taylorism; (3) curriculum; (4) the over-specialization of faculty; and (5) the silo effect of departmentalization within colleges and universities [Veysey (1965), Thelin (2004)].

§ 3.1 The Utility Movement in Higher Education

'Utility education' is Veysey's aptly chosen name for an academic reform movement variously known to its supporters by the names 'practical,' 'useful,' 'service,' or 'vocational' education. The variety of labels by which the movement was known to its own supporters serves as a warning that its basic idea was ill-defined and, consequently, served as more of a slogan than as a plan or an objective. Veysey used "utility" as the common name for the collective of diverse attitudes that came together just after the Civil War of 1861-65 to change American higher education.

The word 'utility' as so used has only a tenuous connection with the moral philosophy known as utilitarianism, with its Epicurean underpinnings, promoted by philosophers such as John Stuart Mill. At least this is so with regard to the education reformers; the name is aptly used in the latter context when referenced to the attitudes of the college students. This deontological disconnect between the moralities of educators and education reformers and those of the student body did not begin in 1865. There was also such a deontological disconnect between student mini-Society and faculty mini-Society before the post-Civil War reform era began. Even so, this disconnect had a largely unrecognized importance during both phases of higher education reform. Whenever debate occurs over what education "should" be or what the "right" kind of education is, there are always moral presuppositions standing behind the particulars of reform proposals because words like 'should,' 'ought to,' and 'right' always ultimately refer to objective maxims of mores and folkways. As these are almost always conceived in ontology-centered prejudice and they present only the personal and peculiar effects of individuals' moral codes, the disconnect is ignored only at peril to the success of reformers who ignore or fail to notice it, or to appreciate it de-ontologically. Bode was one of the very few who did notice it and had some appreciation of its effect, a point to which I return in volume III of The Idea of Public Education.

What could over-generously be called 'the utility PAPE' affected more than higher education alone. We see it represented in figure 14.2 by the trade school, vocational education, and business education movements. It appeared also in the junior high and high schools. But it was in higher education where the movement had its deepest antisocial impacts. Veysey wrote,

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During the ten years after 1865, almost every visible change in the pattern of American higher education lay in the direction of concessions to the utilitarian type of demand for reform. This was the period when important numbers of utility-minded leaders first achieved respectable positions. . . . The initial academic revolution, if such it was, constituted far more of a voluntary accommodation than it did an armed invasion from below.

Soon faced with competition from other types of academic reformers, the advocates of utility gained two conspicuous havens within the new university framework. First, they frequently became administrative leaders. For the administrator, useful service was a notion broad enough to encompass the variety of unrelated studies which was actually appearing; also, in the newly energetic state universities, emphasis on public service was enforced by the peculiar position of the president in relation to the legislature and other non-academic pressure groups. Then, secondly, at the faculty level belief in the primary importance of utility characterized most of the professors in the new applied sciences and a majority of the social scientists. As was noted in the instance of philosophy, symptoms of this outlook eventually made small but significant penetrations within the humanities. The combined weight of all these academic men . . . assured that this sort of demand would never lack an adequate hearing. [Veysey (1965), pp. 60-61]

What I would like you to especially note here is Veysey's use of the word "accommodation." The utility movement did not unite the academic, political, and business mini-Communities, much less unite them in common cause with the general public or, especially, with the students. It is quite possible for one mini-Community to accommodate others without assimilating with them. This is easily accomplished through type-α compensation behavior, which in this case takes on the appearances of that which is described by the proverbial phrase "live and let live." Students come and go, staying for only a few brief years; administrative officials likewise come and go, often with little greater longevity than a student's college tenure. Faculty members, on the other hand, come and stay for often a very long time. Accommodation for this reason tends to be made to favor the divers faculty mini-Communities more than anyone else.

This sort of tenuous attitude of mutual accommodation does not produce the unity of a higher education system. It is more aptly described as a convention of traffic laws made for the more convenient and safe passage of independent travelers on the same highway making their own ways to their own divers private destinations. Compensation behaviors of this sort can and do expediently serve to provide for the short-term satisfactions of diverse mini-Communities, and all people are satisficing decision makers. As a side effect, it also places the college dean and the university president and their staffs in the position of attempting to maintain peace and tranquility by what can be likened to herding cats. Because cats are not easily herded, this lays a sufficient subjective groundwork for the emergence of administrative feudalism.

It was a major problem for utility that accommodation was not what any of the utilitarian re-formers had in mind as an objective. Some were committed to "the good of society"; a few to "the good of the students"; others to "serving the public"; others to "the good of" science or art or culture. Other idealistic godheads also existed within the reformers' collective. Accommodation, though, serves none of these aims. As soon as one or more mini-Communities conceived that their aims were not being served to their satisfaction, they would take action to correct this and the tenuous peace and tranquility of type-α compensation would be upset by a new disturbance.

As for the mini-Community of students, their foundational aims – the Duties-to-themselves and the Duties-to-others underpinning the students' divers reasons for becoming students – did not have a representative seated at the negotiating table. This attitude on the part of the reformers is called paternalism, and it amounts in practical terms to regarding and treating young adults as if they were children who required the benevolent protection of an institutionalized Duty of in loco parentis. No reformer asked a student why he was studying engineering or chemistry or literature.

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The reformers merely presumed they already knew the reason, and so the aims of the reformers never took into account actual aims of the students, nor did they give consideration to the reconciliation of these aims with those of the Society to whom the institution of public higher education belongs. Unintentional violations of the social contract were therefore inevitable even among the educator mini-Communities. So it came to pass that in 1987 Bloom could write,

In looking at [the student] we are forced to reflect on what he should learn if he is to be called educated; we must speculate on what the human potential to be fulfilled is. In the specialties we can avoid such speculation, and avoidance of them is one of specialization's charms. But here it is a simple duty. What are we to teach this person? . . . It is childishness to say, as some do, that everyone must be allowed to develop freely, that it is authoritarian to impose a point of view on the student. In that case, why have a university? If the response is "to provide an atmosphere for learning," we come back to our original questions at the second remove. Which atmosphere? Choices and reflections on the reasons for those choices are unavoidable. The university has to stand for something. . . .

The university now offers no distinctive visage to the young person. He finds a demo-cracy of the disciplines – which are there either because they are autochthonous or because they wandered in recently to perform some job that was demanded of the university. This democracy is really an anarchy because there are no recognized rules for citizenship and no legitimate titles to rule. In short there is no vision, nor is there a set of competing visions, of what an educated human being is. The question has disappeared, for to pose it would be a threat to the peace. . . . The student gets no intimation that great mysteries might be revealed to him, that new and higher motives of action might be discovered within him, that a different and more human way of life can be harmoniously constructed by what he is going to learn. [Bloom (1987), pp. 336-337]

Bloom is wrong about one thing here: there are multiple contrary visions of what an educated human being is, each held with sincerity and good intention. The issue is not want of vision; it is surfeit of contradiction among the manifold visions of educators and citizens regarding "what an educated human being is." I encounter manifold diversity in precisely this in nearly every inter-collegiate and university-level committee or panel I serve on. They are frequently held with such a fierce passion as would by its example make a saint feel ashamed of his own comparative lack of devotion to Christ. Type-α compensation behavior via accommodation resulted in lack of unity in understanding what "utility in education" meant. This could point reform towards only one destination – the "democratic anarchy" that Bloom passionately denounced.

§ 3.2 Feudalism and Taylorism in Higher Education

The utility movement from 1870 to 1890 changed the academic face of American colleges, but it was not until the second phase of the higher education reformation that the American university came into being. Thelin tells us,

Between 1880 and 1890 only a handful of institutions in the United States had legitimate claim to being a "real university." Apart from Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Harvard, Clark, and Columbia, the list of serious contenders was slim. . . . All this changed dramatically over the next three decades. A landmark event occurred in 1900, when the presidents of fourteen institutions met to form the Association of American Universities1 . . .

Growth and success characterized the era of the "university-builders" between 1880 and 1910. The wealth and energy of the period made for an exciting time in higher education. It

1 Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, University of Chicago, University of California, Clark, Cornell, Catholic University, University of Michigan, Stanford, University of Wisconsin, Princeton, Yale, and University of Pennsylvania.

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was not, however, a smooth evolution. Accounts of the university-builders – a mix of donors and presidents – indicate that the risks and rivalries that defined American business competition of the era were replicated on the American campus. The similarities prompted Thorstein Veblen2 to coin the satirical term "captains of erudition," echoing the popular phrase "captains of industry," to characterize the university-builders' approach to academic affairs. Among the university-builders there was distrust, contempt, chicanery, and sabotage. . . .

One factor contributing to the emergence of many universities during these decades was industry – the discretionary wealth generated by American corporations and enterprises in the late nineteenth century. . . . Beyond the philanthropy made possible by business fortunes, industrial organization provided models for academic structure. Foremost among these influences was the approximation on the campus of a corporate model of hierarchy and offices for faculty and staff. Second was the growing numerical presence of industrial leaders as trustees on university boards, eventually leading to the rhetorical slogan, "Why can't a college be run like a business?" [Thelin (2004), pp. 110-113]

Given the profit performance comparisons between corporations and proprietorships presented in previous chapters and the fact that people who use this slogan usually mean "managed like a corporation," it is better to ask, "Why are businesses run like businesses are?" Thelin continues,

"Science" as it was invoked in American institutions – government, business, and education – was less a value system at odds with religion than an organizational ethos that prized order and efficiency. Whether reforming public schools, businesses, or higher education, the Progressives had confidence that their reliance on expertise and analysis could promote the "one best system" in American institutions. For an endeavor or an organization to be "scientific" meant that it was disciplined, ordered, and systematic – in other words, that it adhered to the principles of "scientific management." [ibid., pg. 114]

Thelin's use of the word "science" here, even if it is allowed that he is attempting to describe how that word was misused by university administrators and trustees, is equivocal. It is very important to mark the distinction between "science" – as in physics, chemistry, etc. – and "scientific management" (otherwise known as Taylorism), which was and is a pseudo-science. It is an historical fact that "science" is often abused by propagandists seeking to cloak something that is not science in the respectability that actual science often commands. This takes place, for example, when Aquinas claims theology is a science because "divine revelation" is to be regarded as a scientific fact, or when present day fundamentalists employ the term "creation science" to dress a religious dogma up as something it is not. This sort of thing has been going on for a very long time indeed. Plato contemptuously called the practice "flattery" in Gorgias, and this seems to me an apt label. Not all Progressives mistook Taylorism for science, but many clearly did.

Veysey provides a clearer account of changes that took hold in the character of the behaviors and attitudes of chief officials at the new universities from 1890 to 1910. First,

Students, benefactors, alumni, and trustees all constituted concrete sources of business-minded influence upon the university. Equally important were the ways in which the internal structure of the academic establishment came to suggest a "businesslike" tone in its arrangements. . . . In this context it was entirely to be expected that academic administrators should be admiringly compared with the actual "captains of industry." The

2 Veblen was a maverick professor who succeeded in gaining some public notoriety for his witty writings on the topics of "the leisure class" and "conspicuous consumption." By all accounts he was a poor teacher, a womanizer whose escapades were considered scandalous, and a constant thorn in the side of university presidents. He was fired from several leading universities and ended his career with a succession of visiting professor appointments arranged through former graduate students who had become professors.

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selection of a university president was admittedly analogous to the choice of a business executive. Furthermore, any organization requires internal discipline, and in an age of enterprise it was understandable that university presidents often viewed "their" professors as "hired men." "University custom tends to hold the department executive responsible for his associates, after the fashion of business corporations," noted David Starr Jordan3 in 1907. The administrator also compared his role with that of a general organizing an army, or with the coxswain in a racing shell. More strikingly, Andrew D. White4 declared: "I lay much stress on good physical health as well as intellectual strength [in choosing a faculty]. I want no sickly young professors, if I can avoid them." Such words suggest a plantation owner in the antebellum South anxious to secure prime field hands. . . . Like shrewd businessmen, university presidents and trustees sought to pay their faculty as little as the "market price" demanded; both Eliot5 and Gilman6 were more parsimonious in this respect than the financial condition of their institutions required. [Veysey (1965), pp. 351-352]

As if university presidents are not also "hired men." Personally, I would not hire most business executives, including most of the pseudo-business-executives hired to be university presidents, to manage a lemonade stand. It is a mark of the power of propaganda that Veysey refers to the latter half of the 19th century as "an age of enterprise" but means only the phenomenon of industrial enterprise (as represented by Carnegie, Rockefeller, et al.). The most fresh-faced apprentice learning his future trade in a Philadelphia shoe shop of 1700 was engaged in personal enterprise no less than was J.P. Morgan when he brokered the founding of the U.S. Steel Corporation early in the 20th century. From the day colonists first set foot in Virginia, there has never been an era in America that was not an "age of enterprise." It is pompous aggrandizement to say Carnegie was an entrepreneur but a teenager working the drive-through window at a local fast food restaurant is not. One can, however, speak of an age of uncivic enterprise. No public institute habituated to uncivic practices can well and faithfully fulfill the civil Duties for which it was established. The behaviors are incompatible with fulfilling the expectation. Veysey continues with

It was no special sign of dollar-madness when stationery was changed to read "President's Office" rather than the older form of "President's Rooms," or when the professor's "study" likewise underwent this change in terminology. Sometimes, however, there were symptoms of a deeper change in attitude. In 1900 a college president who chose anonymity wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly zealously pleading for the freedom of any "other" business executive. He chafed at the irritation of not being able to discharge faculty malcontents without being challenged. Deplorable waste would continue, this man argued, "until the business of education is regarded in a business light, is cared for by business methods."

It is easy to see why academic institutions came in many ways to resemble businesses; it is more interesting, possibly, to observe the ways in which they did not. At all the major universities a sense of informal limitations developed beyond which the exercise of power from "above" was considered unjust, according to criteria that were never clearly stated. These limitations prevented the university from becoming a department store. Trustees themselves, ironically enough, could lack the business acumen to invest endowments wisely. And professors did not hold "office hours" forty-eight hours a week.7 They did like to bargain for more money, but there was a point beyond which many of them could not be

3 then-president of Stanford University; prior to 1891 he was president of Indiana University 4 president of Cornell University 5 president of Harvard University 6 president of Johns Hopkins University 7 The average work week for postal employees was 48 hours per week from 1890 through 1920. In other occupations in the year 1890 it ranged from 62 hours per week for payroll employees in manufacturing industries to 51 hours per week in the building trades. The 40 hour week work did not begin to take hold until 1946 and in the 1960s there were many wage-earner entrepreneurs whose standard work week was 48 hours (eight hours per day, six days per week). [Bureau of the Census (1965), D 589-600]

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bought in this fashion. Leland Stanford and William R. Harper both discovered this fact as they offered prospective employees larger and larger sums, only to be met in a number of cases by firm refusals. Here was the most concrete indication that educational entrepreneurs could not have everything their own way. Much opposition, intellectual as well as self-protective, existed when the Taylorite "efficiency" craze began to seek academic targets just after 1910. . . . Even Andrew S. Draper of Illinois, the arch-example of worldliness among university executives, was forced to admit: "Of course the university cannot become a business corporation with a business corporation's ordinary implications. . . . The distinguishing ear-marks of an American university are its moral purpose, its scientific aim, its unselfish public service, its inspirations to all men in all noble things, and its incorruptibility by commercialism." . . . The distinction which Draper emphasized was echoed by most other university presidents: business means but not business ends. . . . That the leadership of the university tended to identify itself with business aspects rather more than did the lower ranks of the faculty was not as ominous as it seemed, for the consequent misrepresentation of the academic center of gravity gave the public an important and necessary feeling of reassurance. . . . This did not mean that, from the point of view of a clearly articulated academic role, danger was lacking in the situation. The misrepresented center of gravity could acutely threaten to become the real one. [ibid., pp. 352-354]

Personally, I'm far from convinced it was either important, necessary, or not-reprehensible to mislead the public. I do agree it was important and wise to inform the public that a fundamental change had happened, that the old church-centered, minister-preparing, sinecure-like character of the pre-Civil War college institution had been overthrown, and that reforms were being attempted so as to make colleges and universities better serve the general public.

Frederick W. Taylor did not invent a science of "scientific management." He presented a few platitudes over-generalized from a set of experiments with low-skilled jobs, and he presented a quack pseudo-psychology. Publication in 1911 of Scientific Management provided a cover of respectability for uncivic practices, contributed to exaltation of these practices, and helped to spread the influence of a gospel of managerial incompetence far and wide. Taylorism was already being practiced in the steel industry long before Taylor's book hit the bookstores and his name came to be associated with the practices. A single excerpt from his book serves to unmask the underlying state-of-nature outlawism that permeates every fiber of Taylorism:

Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron is . . . that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental makeup the ox than any other type. . . . he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself [Taylor (1911), pg. 25].

The net effect of the administrative changes that took place from 1890 to 1910 was institution of an uncivic feudal system as the method of managing the leadership dynamic within the 20th century university and college. It established a system of enterprise management, conforming to governance by the monarchy/oligarchy form of governance, that has been perpetuated to this day. It does not abolish feudalism when one merely changes who shall be the lord, the varlet, and the serf. I think it ironic that administration and management in both public education and business should have come to be governed by the same antisocial form of governance that the American Revolution fought to abolish. If it were not for the power of folkway, I would think it peculiar that a great majority of Americans accept without question the inconsistency of having sanctioned elements of moral outlawism instituted into American Society as a casual matter of normalcy.

§ 3.3 Curriculum and Departmentalism in Higher Education

Probably the most distinguishing feature of higher education reform was the birth of the elective system, pioneered at Harvard by Eliot and by White at Cornell. This shift to "utility" in

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higher education brought with it a multiplication of new subject matters and courses that broadened university offerings well beyond the traditional "classics" that had characterized pre-Civil War colleges. Younger new faculty members developed many more courses than a student could possibly take in four years. This led to the replacement of the old "prescribed curriculum" – in which the college dictated to the student what courses he was required to take – to a system in which he was allowed to choose which subject matters he wished to study. This, too, was mislabeled "democracy" in education and was when higher education abandoned its Duty to the social dimension of PIE. By the mid-1880s educators were judging that excessive liberality in course election was producing too little focus necessary for students' educations. Potter noted,

With the leadership of the land-grant colleges and the technical institutes and the pressure of business interests, colleges began to expand their curricular offerings, though often with great reluctance and against faculty resistance. As new subjects were added, old ones lost their privileged positions. . . .

This expanded curriculum created the problem of which subjects the students would take. In 1884 the eighty Harvard faculty members taught "about four hundred and twenty-five hours of public instruction a week without any repetitions." In four years an undergraduate could not take more than a tenth of what was then being offered. . . .

At Indiana University, President David Starr Jordan introduced a plan of specialization within electives. In 1886 he instituted the "major subject" system, requiring students in their junior and senior years to choose a specialty or major. A "major professor" was appointed to counsel the student in planning his program so that there would be some coherence in the courses taken and yet be "best fitted to his [the student's] tastes and capacity." In addition, students might have minors or elective studies. Some form of compromise between free election and required subjects was the rule among the American universities at the turn of the century. [Potter (1967), pp. 303-305]

The Indiana innovation marked the beginning of the advising system that is still found in colleges and universities today. It marked the beginning of the "major" as the specialized course of study, ubiquitous in higher education today, and the advisor as a helmsman for curricular navigation.

Perhaps because of the laissez faire and ad hoc way in which new courses and new subject matters were introduced at the innovating universities, it is difficult to identify any uniformly applicable taxonomy of subject matters characteristic of the reformed institution of higher education. The usual divisions are: the physical-natural sciences and mathematics; engineering; the social sciences; the humanities (which generally included study of classics as a subset); agri-culture; and education. From various comments by Potter, Veysey, Thelin, and from statistics published by the Census Bureau and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the following rough taxonomy, representing the now-traditional classification, can be sketched:

the technical arts: the basic physical-natural sciences (chemistry, physics, the biological sciences); mathematics; engineering; psychology; and the special technical arts (earth sciences, basic medical sciences, medical science, and the agricultural sciences);

the social sciences: sociology; economics; history; law; anthropology; political science; and other topical subject-matters (e.g. business, a pseudo-science);

the humanities: the classics; English language and literature; foreign languages and literature; philosophy; music; fine and commercial art; architecture (organizationally placed at some schools under 'engineering'); and theater arts.

Awkwardly appended to this is higher education's version of the normal school, i.e., the colleges of education that were established at some institutes of higher education. Like engineering, colleges of education were at first largely regarded by other disciplines – when they were regarded at all – as "tradesman-like" and, consequently, were regarded by traditionally-minded

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"scholars" with the suspicion that perhaps they didn't really belong in "the modern university" at all. It was principally through the sometimes autocratic direction of utility-minded university presidents that these two areas of study were included in the "university community." Both were at first "poor cousins" in relationship to "the more important" academic disciplines. Engineering, by weight of its enrollment growth and ability to attract large amounts of external research funding after World War II, eventually shoved its way into the "academic mainstream" of the university. Today it exists in a state of armistice with the other colleges, more tolerated than accepted by the traditional physical-natural sciences and humanities disciplines.

The college of education, on the other hand, never did quite succeed in being assimilated into this "mainstream" to the same degree, resulting in the not-inaccurate quip that 120th Street in New York City (which separates Teachers College from the rest of Columbia University) is "the widest street in the world" [Mirel (2011)]. This academic discrimination is so pervasive and institutionalized that Census Bureau abstracts often do not place college of education data in the same series with data on other higher education statistics. Both Veysey and Thelin have barely a word to say about the colleges of education. Professors in other colleges rarely have so much as one credit of college study in teaching or curriculum development in their backgrounds. Your author has only three, which I acquired from a teaching practicum as a college senior majoring in engineering. Some acquire their knowledge of teaching and curriculum development through such educational Self-development activities as tutoring, experience from working as laboratory instructors, and/or participation in developing employee continuing education and/or training programs in private-sector industry. Many have nothing more than the "on the job training" they unavoidably experience when they begin their teaching careers. Many a college student has paid a dear price for being made a guinea pig of this informal institution of professorial OJT.

Adding to basic taxonomy difficulties, from the 1890s forward many of the subject areas were busily engaged in redefining themselves. Veysey remarked,

But once the existence of a newer educational ideal ["utility"] had become firmly established, the air of institutional unity quickly began to evaporate. At most universities each subject came to be regarded as just as "good" as any other. In theory a professor of agriculture was as respectable as a professor of Greek; therefore their purposes were entitled to equal consideration by the university president who stood over both of them. Toleration would ultimately emerge from this situation; everyone would leave everyone else alone unless a particular jurisdictional quarrel arose. The university went several ways at once. It crystallized into a collection of divergent minds, usually ignoring each other, commonly talking past one another, and periodically enjoying the illusion of a dialogue on "safe" issues. . . .

On the usual campus could be found pockets of excitement over research, islands of devotion to culture, and segments of adherence to the aim of vocational service – all existing together. . . . Therefore, it should always be kept in mind that nearly every major American university was too diverse a place to be identified with any one academic philosophy. . . .

There is also another entire dimension to this complexity, the one furnished by the individual departments of learning which were coming into being in the eighties and nineties. . . . Many academic disciplines housed professors of strongly clashing educational views. To be sure, a fair number of departments became clearly identified with a single academic outlook of a larger sort: research in the case of the natural sciences, or culture in that of the fine arts. But in these terms some of the most important academic departments instead became intramural battlegrounds. . . . Departments of English were split between partisans of culture and devotees of philological research. Sociology, itself in the process of breaking away from economics during the nineties, had endless trouble defining its relationship both to social utility and empirical research. Economics was divided between

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the upholders of the old classical theories . . . and believers in utility, research, or a combination of the two. . . . These are just a few examples of the extremely complex state of affairs that developed within the new institutions of learning. [Veysey (1965), pp. 58-59]

The emergence of specialized departments, each dedicated to some specialized field of study, contributed to the development of fragmented silos of knowledge that, over time, became ever more isolated from one another. I say more about this in the next section. As both professors and students pursued their own areas of interest in increasing depth, correspondingly less exposure to other subject-matters resulted. It is difficult to say whether the departments created the colleges or the colleges created the departments. There were clearly significant degrees of co-determination that took place in establishing the now-traditional structure of administrators placed over colleges and colleges placed over departments. Hardly anything else was to be expected from a hierarchal business model of corporate organization, a form that was itself copied from the Roman legion. In any case, there could hardly have been a development more inimical to counteracting the divers sources of mini-Community granulation and competition in American Society overall, nor to the practicality of developing an empirical science of education. No one should be surprised that a sort of education alchemy rather than a science of education evolved out of departmentalism.

The academic Community was not, of course, wholly ignorant of the problem of integration. The 1880-1910 period of higher education reform occurred against a backdrop of general moral customs and national folkways representative of America and distinguishable from European influences. Divers efforts were made to devise "core curricula" covering matters it was agreed all college students should be exposed to (I will not say "educated in"). But there is perhaps no other single area of higher education subject-matter that has been more ravaged by conflicting PAPEs within the universities. This, too, is a predictable consequence of the silo effect of specialization and departmentalization because anything meriting being called a core education is ipso facto an interdisciplinary form of education. That form of education was never achieved anywhere within the institution of 20th century American public instructional education. It is not being achieved now by the few and toothless gropings for reform being called "the interdisciplinary movement" today. Any program or proposal that actually moves in the direction of a true inter-disciplinary system of education is immediately confronted by alliances of specialized silos, competing deans, and higher education administrators responding to disturbance of the Taylorite institutional management structure that actual interdisciplinarity provokes.

§ 3.4 Over-specialization

Disciplinary specialization was at once both the greatest benefit and the most antisocial factor to emerge from the 1880-1910 higher education reforms. Its practical benefits to physical-natural sciences, crafts and applied technologies have been assumed since before the time of Plato. Plato was the great champion of the division of labor two millennia before Adam Smith was born. It reflects the not-unreasonable supposition that if we need to know more about something, that deeper knowledge will be most quickly obtained by those with the greatest degree of expertise about that something. It also reflects a presupposition that depth of knowledge can be obtained only at the expense of breadth of knowledge – something that in fact is untrue.

One should challenge both suppositions because both presuppose the ultimate understanding of any specific thing is understanding that converges to a single point concept, as if knowledge of any subject is like a lonely mountain that rises to a single peak. Upon what is this presupposition based? In no branch of science have we ever discovered that understanding of any phenomenon is like a lonely mountain. All fecund knowledge, if it is to be fecund, requires not only depth of topical knowledge – let us say, for example, knowledge of fluorine chemistry – but also breadth of knowledge – how knowledge of fluorine is applicable to, say, making Teflon. In its turn, the

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fecundity in knowing how fluorine is used to make Teflon presupposes knowledge of some problem for which Teflon is found to be a solution. The perfect specialist, like the perfect generalist, is an ideal – an image or projection – of someone never actually encountered in any sphere of living enterprise. Just as it is true that an ideal generalist "is a guy who knows less and less about more and more until eventually he knows nothing about everything," so too an ideal specialist "is a guy who knows more and more about less and less until eventually he knows everything about nothing." That specialization (or generalization) is an unalloyed good is nothing but a Platonic fantasy. Specialization is beneficial up to some degree and thereafter becomes a disbenefit and a handicap. Generalization is beneficial up to some degree and thereafter likewise becomes a disbenefit and a handicap. But higher education reform saw only the near term benefit and, except in the protests of a few 'old guard' classicists, failed to see beyond that. As is usual in cases where a general movement is fueled by enthusiasm, there was a lunge toward false promise in an ideal that lies forever beyond the horizon of possible human experience.

As academic departments of specialized knowledge were formed, it was presumed that this division of labor tactic walked arm in arm with practicality – the mantra of the utility movement. A new emphasis on research was likewise seen as a vehicle in which both could ride ahead into a glorious future. Veysey wrote,

In two important ways . . . the growth of research produced basic changes in the nature of American higher education. Responsibility for the first change, a tendency toward ever increasing specialization of knowledge, it shared with the movement toward practicality. The second, liberation of the intellect for its own sake, resulted more exclusively from the climate of abstract investigation, although intellect was eventually to owe a certain degree of its increasing acceptance to advocates of liberal culture.

The dominant characteristic of the new American universities was their ability to shelter specialized departments of knowledge. To the extent that these departments represented vocational aspirations, the desire for a practical version of higher learning had set the tendency toward specialization in motion. Few of the new departments, however, avoided all claim to be advancing knowledge through investigations or experiments, and many of the natural and social sciences soon came to justify their existence in terms of the research they conducted. That a scientific outlook would bring with it an inexorable drift toward specialization of effort should have seemed natural to any observer versed in Western traditions. . . .

In consequence, the old-time professor who was jack-of-all-disciplines rapidly disappeared from all but the bypassed small colleges. "Smattering is dissipation of energy," declared G. Stanley Hall in 1882. . . . The most pronounced effect of the increasing emphasis on specialized research was a tendency among scientifically minded professors to ignore the undergraduate college and to place a low value upon their function as teachers. A few bold voices were heard to say that the college ought to be abolished altogether and replaced by an extension of the secondary school [high school]. Others were content to see the college merely languish. [Veysey (1965), pp. 142-144]

Such job-centric attitudes are antisocial in basic character. These are attitudes that at once cut the ground for public higher education from under the university itself. There is no public interest and no justification under the social contract for members of the general public to support the private intellectual interests of individual professors with public money. Yet the move to adopt a system of over-specialization, and to neglect instructional education, was precisely the direction American higher education took between 1880 and 1910. By the 1950s, the public backlash against the sinecures it established began to be felt.

The lopsidedness with which specialization was embraced is reflected in the distribution of Ph.D. degrees granted from 1920 to 1970. Throughout this period, an average of 54.99% of all

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Ph.D. degrees awarded by U.S. higher education were accounted for by just ten of the technical arts: physics, chemistry, earth science, mathematics, engineering, basic medical sciences, medical science, agricultural science, the biological sciences, and psychology. The standard deviation in this statistic is 2.250% and the range is from a low of 49.5% in 1946 to a high of 60.3% in 1923 [Bureau of the Census (1976), Series H 766-787]. Physics, chemistry, the biological sciences, and mathematics alone accounted for between 22.16% (1969) and 36.63% (1924) all of Ph.D. degrees granted. Figure 14.4 graphs the percentage of Ph.D. degrees granted in these ten principal technical arts and selected subsets of these from 1920 to 1970.

Especially in the early 20th century, by far the most common destination for a person who had just obtained a Ph.D. degree was a college or university where he would become a professor. For many years in the early 20th century, the graduate school at Johns Hopkins (the first in the nation) was the sole domestic supplier of professors to other colleges and universities. (The rest obtained their degrees in Europe). That a great preponderance of new Ph.D.s were trained in only a few narrow specialties carried with it the effect of developing a sort of tunnel vision in collegiate education. This might have been a predictable consequence of specialization in higher education, but it was not predicted by its advocates. These advocates, among whom Harvard's President Eliot was the foremost leader, subscribed to a belief in what became known as the "open inquiry model" of education, which held that a liberalized form of mental discipline in one specialized subject area would stimulate the learner to learn about other areas as well [Eliot (1869, 1901)].

This premise is highly questionable on its own merits, but in any case the faith the promoters of specialization displayed was naïve in assuming the ability of a person to expand the breadth of his knowledge implied he would do so. To my knowledge, no comprehensive scientific study has ever been made inquiring into the motivators of personal choice in selecting a specialty, but there are at least four factors known to influence such a choice: (1) the Desire of the learner to acquire a marketable job skill highly demanded in the employment market; (2) the intellectual interest the person has in a particular subject-matter (as a means of satisfying the drive to perfect his own intellectual Personfähigkeit); (3) the effects of counsel and urgings by the person's friends and parents; and (4) his private moral regard by which he views his possible choices.

Figure 14.4: Percentages of Ph.D. degrees granted in selected fields from 1920 to 1970. KEY: TA = the ten principal technical arts (physics, chemistry, earth science, mathematics, engineering, basic medical

sciences, medical sciences, agricultural science, the biological sciences, and psychology); PCMB = physics, chemistry, mathematics, and biological sciences; E = engineering; M = mathematics. Source: Bureau of the

Census (1976) Series H 766-787.

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These are factors that admix private maxims of Duty with factors from the individual's social environment. As I said, there has been no comprehensive scientific study by which we can quantify the relative effects each of these factors has as a partial cause, but there is no doubt that the end result was granulation of divers self-interests and a narrowing of social outlook. Both are injurious to the social contract and contrary to corporate public interest in public education. The distribution of majors among Ph.D.s is an indirect indicator of how members of the public view what best serves their individual Duties to themselves and others. The narrowness of breadth illustrated in figure 14.4 is symptomatic of hindrances that lead to a breakdown of public instructional education in the social dimension of the learner. It was nearly guaranteed that specialization in the disciplines would lead to over-specialization in the disciplines, a result that the 'old guard' traditionalists of prescribed curricula and classical studies feared and never tired of issuing warnings about.

However, there was nothing inherent in the elective system or in specialization that carries the weight of necessity in determining the outcome that occurred. The proponents and opponents of specialization and the electives system argued from opinion, not from science, and in such a case it is an easy matter to determine one's own position on the question from subjective judgments of taste – and that is precisely what did happen in the lead-up to 1910. If the students' preparations in their primary and secondary education experiences had prepared them in the social dimension of the learner, the fears of the traditionalists might have been groundless and the presuppositions of the reformers might have been on solid foundations. However, the earlier stage of education did not so prepare the students, and that was the flaw in the arguments for specialization and elective curricula. In fairness to Eliot (and others), he never argued in favor of narrow specialization. It was always part of his vision for higher education that specialization in a discipline be augmented by broader topical instruction [Veysey (1965), pp. 66-73]. However, in the design of any system or institution "the devil is in the details" and the reformers of 1880-1910 were neither a cohesive nor scientifically qualified group of "education-engineers." Consequently, myriad details suffered from lack of enough careful attention needed to ensure the reformers' desired outcomes were actually achieved. The conflicting PAPEs of higher education subsequently spilled over into the institution of public instructional education at the primary and secondary levels as well.

§ 4. The PAPEs

To understand the reasons why the 20th century reforms in public instructional education failed, it is necessary to understand the paradigms of the competing PAPEs to which the various reformers committed their allegiances. Each had something useful to offer, just as each contained other elements that were contrary to human nature or contrary to the American social contract.

§ 4.1 Spiritual Perennialism

It is accurate enough to say most of the reforms effected in the 20th century from 1906 until 1940 aimed to eradicate a prior PAPE characterized by a combination of Hegelianism, spiritualism, idealism, "mental discipline," and assorted dogmas of Christian theology. This PAPE came to be labeled "perennialism." Its foremost academic spokesmen were Josiah Royce at Harvard and Herman Horne, originally at Dartmouth and later at New York University. Its most prominent proponent was school superintendent and U.S. Commissioner of Education (1889-1906) William T. Harris. Although it is the usual mistaken practice to label the systematically articulated views of those who came to be tagged with the label "perennialist" as "philosophy," these views are more accurately described as philosophized theologies.

It is today somewhat difficult to recapture the educational elements held forth by this PAPE because 20th century history came to be dominated and written either by the victors who had

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opposed and successfully overthrown it in the re-institution of PIE or by later education historians who, in the main, seem to have examined it rather superficially. Ravitch does not mention either Royce or Horne, although she does provide a brief and generally balanced report of Harris' views [Ravitch (2000), pp. 32-38]. Potter likewise does not mention Royce or Horne but does provide a very brief synopsis of Harris' public positions [Potter (1967), pp. 277-8]. Reese also omits any mention of Royce or Horne but provides some mention of Harris' policies and opinions. Angus & Mirel are effectively silent about all three men. Pulliam & Patten mention all three, but only long enough to say they were idealists. In The Principles of Psychology William James made oblique references to Royce, without naming him specifically, when he even-handedly represented the positions taken by those he referred to as "the spiritualists" [James (1890)]. It is probably the overt spiritualist tenets of Royce and Horne that can account for their lack of mention by education historians, and the more policy-directed positions he spoke for that accounts for Harris' representation in American education history.

It is true enough that the principal expressions of this PAPE – a sort of dogmatic idealism in combination with generally inhumane presuppositions about human nature, a commitment to the false doctrine of mental discipline, and an emphasis on drill, memorization, and automaton-like regurgitation – was a hindrance to effective teaching. Its one-sided and dogmatic insistence on Christian, and particularly Protestant, religion as the sole basis for morality was in large measure antisocial, extremely prejudicial to Americans of other religious faiths, and contrary to the civil liberty of the individual's private pursuit and practice of his own religious faith. Its generally antagonistic attitude toward science, and the war it waged against Darwin's theory, were utterly contrary to social Progress, although its condemnation of the materialism of the Gilded Age was a valid if overruled stance against uncivic free enterprise. In contrast, this same materialism was embraced by both the Progressives and the Essentialists.

Many of the most important curricular elements championed by the spiritualism PAPE, when shorn of overt attachment to any specific religious faith, were valid and, indeed, are key curricular functions for PIE in the social dimension of the learner. These include the study of great literature, history, grammar, and geography. They also include study of great past debates and reasoned philosophizing about hard-to-quantify social issues. (This later came to be the principal emphasis of the Great Books movement that began in the 1930s). Harris stressed the importance of providing learners with experiences that promote self-discipline, self-control, and habits of behavior congruent with the mores and folkways of the learner's Society.

Great literature can be an early substitute for a young learner's lack of personal experience during his early years8 (in great contrast to pulp fiction, propaganda, opinionated egocentrism, superstition, and all the baby pabulum born during the 1960s civil war that came to be passed off as proper matter for a general education in U.S. public colleges and universities). History provides vital lessons pertaining to how human beings and their Societies attempted to cope with major problems, and unveils both great insights and tragic errors. Knowledge of grammar, eloquence of expression, and knowledge of rudimentary oratory and rhetoric serve the learner in perfecting the persuasive power of his person as well as providing him with some safeguards against becoming hypnotized and duped by the machinations of skilled propaganda. Experience,

8 Great literature, but not necessarily the original works themselves. A twelve-year-old isn't going to exhibit either the patience or the integrative ability to absorb, e.g., Shakespeare. However, every work of creative literature can be re-expressed in alternate forms and modernized language so as to be made accessible even to a child in primary school. The old Classics Illustrated comic books of the 1950s and early 1960s stand as quite good demonstrations of one way this is possible. So too do some of the old Walt Disney classics. It is quite wrong to dismiss potentially educational vehicles like these as mere "entertainment" or child's play. That "scientific" Progressives did so merely betrays a prejudice of underlying contempt for human Nature. In some ways these speculators were more Calvinist in their outlooks than the Puritans.

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provided with proper design by the teacher, in arts and music can be made to orient the learner's processes of judgment of taste, which is a necessary propaedeutic in preparing him for objective learning. A properly designed study of geography can be made to combat the natural egocentrism by which every child presumes the entire world is a copy of his own locality. It thus begins a process by which the learner can gradually appreciate the expanse of human social diversity and the reasons for it. For example, to properly apprehend BaMbuti Society, it is necessary to know a little about the Congo and the other people who inhabit it. One shortcoming in the Essentialists' outlook on education was a lack of appreciation for the importance of breadth of experience, a factor necessary for safeguarding domestic tranquility but difficult to appreciate in a narrow context of job skills and circumstances of the social environment in the here-and-now.

Like battling political parties, the mutually hostile 20th century PAPE factions came to be close-minded about others' ideas and positions, rejected civil debate over issues, and raised knee-jerk opposition to others' ideas and proposals simply because their side had not proposed them. A great many educational reforms were put into place through political force rather than reasoned consensus. This demonstrates the antisocial rulership quality of democracy in action; a resort to the use of political force and subversion of justice by means of the legal system is one of its most common manifestations of enacting satisficing judgments of taste. As Mill noted,

It is not much to be wondered at if impatient or disappointed reformers, groaning under the impediments opposed to the most salutary public improvements by the ignorance, the indifference, the intractableness, the perverse obstinacy of a people, and the corrupt combinations of selfish private interests armed with the powerful weapons afforded by free institutions, should at times sigh for a strong hand to bear down all these obstacles and compel a recalcitrant people to be better governed. But (setting aside the fact that for one despot who now and then reforms an abuse, there are ninety-nine who do nothing but create them) those who look in any such direction for the realization of their hopes leave out of the idea of good government its principal element, the improvement of the people themselves. One of the benefits of freedom is that under it the ruler cannot pass by the people's minds and amend their affairs for them without amending them. . . . Any education which aims at making people better than machines in the long run makes them claim to have the control of their own actions. [Mill (1861), pp. 30-31]

In the case of spiritual perennialism, forcible reform led to, as the saying goes, the baby being thrown out with the bathwater. The bathwater was the overt connection spiritual perennialists made to too-specific tenets of one group of religious faiths. That was the chief antisocial factor contributing to the defeat and dismissal of their arguments. The old system was antisocial because it tried to codify the interests and doctrines of one species of faith, Protestantism, over those held by other Americans. It was, socially, an anti-Progress institution (contrary to personal and social Progress, not contrary to the PAPE named Progressivism) because in its more obviously faith-based doctrines it set up a false opposition between objective science and speculative religion.

It is a somewhat mitigating circumstance that natural science, then as now, was dominated by ontology-centered metaphysics; theology, by basic character of its subject-matter, is inherently ontology-centered. When a scientist's ontology-centered prejudice is made to stand in opposition to theological premises, conflict is inevitable. One instance of this in which a scientist over-stepped the limits of his professional practice is provided by Edmund Halley's alleged injudicious ridicule of Anglican theology, which provoked Bishop Berkeley's justly stinging public rebuttal:

Though I am a stranger to your person, yet I am not, Sir, a stranger to the reputation you have acquired in that branch of learning which hath been your peculiar study; nor to the authority that you therefore assume in things foreign to your profession; nor to the abuse that you, and too many more of the like character, are known to make of such undue authority, to the misleading of unwary persons in matters of the highest concernment, and

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whereof your mathematical knowledge can by no means qualify you to be a competent judge. Equity indeed and good sense would incline one to disregard the judgment of men in points which they have not considered or examined. But several who make the loudest claim to those qualities do nevertheless the very thing they would seem to despise, clothing themselves in the livery of other men's opinions, and putting on a general deference for the judgment of you Gentlemen who are presumed to be of all men the greatest masters of reason, to be most conversant about distinct ideas, and never to take things on trust but always clearly to see your way as men whose constant employment is the deducing of truth by the justest inference from the most evident principles. With this bias on their minds, they submit to your decisions where you have no right to decide. And that is one short way of making Infidels, I am credibly informed. [Berkeley (1734), pg. 17]

Objectively valid science can only be based on epistemology-centered metaphysics, and when this is the case there is no fundamental conflict whatsoever between faith and science because they lie in orthogonal planes of human knowledge and speculation. The remark often attributed to Galileo, that science "tells us only how the heavens go, not how to go to Heaven," is correct. Conflict can then only arise if some particular religious group does in reverse what Halley is alleged to have done – that is, intrude its religious doctrines into the field of natural science – and chooses to pick a fight with science. Objectively valid science can say nothing whatsoever, either in support of or opposition to, religious speculation because the objectively valid scope of science is limited strictly to explaining natural phenomena in the phenomenal world, whereas all legitimate theology is concerned with matters of noumena forever beyond the horizon of possible human experience. However, science can and is obliged to speak, strictly within limitations of objective validity, against myths and superstitions laying false claim to stand in the place of explanations of phenomenal events and natural history. In the battle of the PAPEs, every faction overstepped the legitimate limitations of their theses and thus fell under Berkeley's just criticism. In education, twentieth century Progressivism did win out but it was a Pyrrhic victory.

Whatever your personal views concerning religion may be, there is one fact of human Society that has real effects too great to be ignored – and the ignórance of this fact is fatal to maintenance of Order in every civil Community. It is this: in every instance of a civilization risen beyond the elementary level of what Santayana called a "natural society," organized religions play a central social role. It is a matter of historical record that different religious factions often come into conflict with one another, and it is seen not-infrequently that these conflicts have produced some of the most appalling enormities in the record of humankind. It is also a matter of record that divers religions can coexist peacefully for long periods of time. It therefore becomes a matter of Duty for a science of public instructional education that its institution develop in the learner grounds of understanding and tolerance for the religious views of others, no matter what these views might be, and teach that it is a civic Duty of every citizen to make no infringements upon others' religious liberty except where that liberty is exercised in violation of the social contract.

Prudence dictates at this point the meaning of the word "religion" not be taken for granted. As in all cases with terms of great importance in social-natural science, the Realerklärung of religion is by Critical requirement one which must be practical, not ontological, speculative, or subjective. Every major religion9 in every civilization that has risen above the level of a natural society

9 By the term "major religion" I mean: a nominal genus designating organized institutions of religious faith characterized by having a very great number of followers holding-by-faith one idea of the presence of a supernatural power, the Dasein of which is held-to-be a ground for the Existenz of the sensible world. The current major religions account for 5.77 billion people and include: Christianity (in its divers forms); Islam; Hinduism; Buddhism; and Chinese folk-religion (a syncretism that takes in Taoism and Confucianism). I do not intend to slight Judaism or strict Shinto, but followers of these faiths constitute only a tiny fraction of humanity. I used an arbitrary threshold of 350 million people for deciding how many people constitute a

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exhibits one common characteristic of religious practice, and it is this common exhibition that leads to the Critical real-explanation stated by Kant: Religion is the contemplation of moral law as a divine precept [Kant (1776-95), 18: 515].

These contemplations exhibit an almost stunning variety of forms and doctrines. Added to this is an almost equally wide set of misunderstandings by faith-holders in divers cultures partially characterized by their aggregations of popular religions. For example, Christianity and Islam tend to characterize Hinduism and Buddhism as faiths having a pantheon of gods and likewise regard many aspects of Chinese folk-religion as espousing ancestor worship. These are, of course, characterizations easily drawn by analogy to pagan Hellenic and Nordic religions. However, the characterization is not really accurate owing to more or less ethnocentric translations that render various oriental words as "deity." It is much more accurate to regard these "pantheons" in terms of angels and demons rather than "gods" [Narayanan (2005); Eckel (2005); Oldstone-Moore (2005a, b); Littleton (2005)]. At the core of every major religion a monotheism is found.

When understood in this way, Christianity and Islam likewise have their pantheons of spiritual beings in the same connotation as this idea is used in the eastern religions. The ancestor veneration of Shinto is little different from veneration of the saints in Catholicism. In Hinduism, Brahma is the direct equivalent of God in Christianity and Allah in Islam. Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Shinto differ only insofar as in these religions the godhead or Divine Ground is not personified. Rather, this Divine Ground is regarded as the Absolute Mystery grounding All-of-Reality (omnitudo realitatis) in a manner very much like what we find in Hegelian theology – which, you may remember, is a system with which orthodox Christianity feels quite at home. For example, the Tao Te Ching begins,

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things. Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations. These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gate to all mystery. [Lao Tzu (6th century BC), chap. 1]10

The point I wish to make here is simply this: there is sufficient commonality in the grounds of all the major religions of the world to provide a basis for education in religious tolerance with an objective approach. To some this may seem an impossibility, but it is not. And here we encounter the practical and legitimate reason why spiritual perennialism cannot be utterly extinguished in public instructional education. The possibility for this education is provided by the real Existenz of that which is properly called Perennial Theology, which has long been known by Westerners, and seemingly by Gandhi, as the philosophia perennis or perennial philosophy. Huxley wrote,

More than twenty-five centuries have passed since that which has been called the Perennial Philosophy was first committed to writing; and in the course of those centuries it has found expression, now partial, now complete, now in this form, now in that, again and again. In Vedanta and Hebrew prophecy, in the Tao Te Ching and the Platonic dialogues, in the Gospel according to St. John and Mahayana theology, in Plotinus and the Areopagite, among the Persian Sufis and the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages and the

"very great number." The five major religions named here were determined from the mid-2011 religious census conducted by the United Nations. The estimated world population then stood at 6.97 billion people. 10 The translation given here is by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English (1972), NY: Random House.

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Renaissance – the Perennial Philosophy has spoken almost all the languages of Asia and Europe and has made use of the terminology and traditions of every one of the higher religions. But under all this confusion of tongues and myths, of local histories and particularist doctrines, there remains a Highest Common Factor, which is the Perennial Philosophy in what may be called its chemically pure state. . . .

At the core of the Perennial Philosophy we find four fundamental doctrines.

First: the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness – the world of things and animals and men and even gods – is the manifestation of a Divine Ground with-in which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.

Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.

Fourth: man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground. [Huxley (1946), pp. 11-13]

Such is the core basis and orientation of every religious theology in every major religion. With such a common core, it is not surprising that it is not difficult to find close correspondences between the religious writings of superficially very different-appearing religious faiths. For example, a Christian has no trouble recognizing the lesson Krishna11 imparted to Arjuna with the words,

Though a man be soiled With the sins of a lifetime, Let him but love me, Rightly resolved, In utter devotion: I see no sinner, That man is holy. Holiness soon shall refresh his nature To peace eternal; O son of Kunti, Of this be certain: The man that loves me, He shall not perish. [Bhagavad-Gita: IX]

When a Christian looks in his Bible for the counterpart to this passage, he finds it in John 3:16.

My point is not that religion per se should be taught in the schools. On the contrary, that is best left in the hands of parents and the divers churches. Rather, my point is that it is necessary to teach religious tolerance if religious freedom is to be protected and guaranteed, including the civil liberty to belong to no church at all. Throughout history we find that where any one church has become numerically dominant within a Society it inclines toward persecution of minority faiths and to make its special religious laws part of the Society's legal code. This, however, is always a

11 Sri Krishna has often been called "the Christ of India" because of the many striking parallels between his life and that of Jesus of Nazareth as these are reported by Hindu and Christian traditions, respectively.

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violation of the social contract in any nation committed to freedom of religion and therefore is always an unjust action. It is part of the social experiments function of persuasion education, in the social division of public instructional education (vol. I), to teach the learner how to develop heuristics for discovering means of reaching mutually acceptable agreements resolving conflicts that arise all too frequently from specific differences between religious doctrines, and for finding mutually acceptable means of cooperation by which divers religious mini-Communities can peacefully coexist without any resort to one-sided compulsion by legal or physical force.

That it is objectively required to teach such heuristics by active and positive means, and not by some semi-scolding admonishment to respect the faith of others, is made necessary by the normal dynamics of human judgmentation and reasoning. All human beings not only make private and personal metaphysical hypotheses, but all human beings likewise naturally construct ever-higher abstract ontological concepts and moral maxims that soon come to pass beyond the horizon of possible human experience and into the realm of unprovable speculation. This occurs due to relentless regulating actions of pure practical Reason for practical perfection of the manifold of concepts and the manifold of rules each human being constructs for himself.

Kant called this the transcendental dialectic of pure Reason. Human reasoning slips all too easily into making ontology-centered errors through this natural dialectic. This was ironically demonstrated by Kant himself when he mistakenly equated the categorical imperative of pure practical Reason with what he called "the moral law within me." The error proved fatal to Kant's effort to produce a deontological universal theory of right, a shortcoming Nell has pointed out:

For the time being, we can do no more with Kant's theory of right in contexts of assessment than to say whether the agent decided rightly. In cases where his maxim was inappropriate either to his situation or his act we may also be able to say something about the reasons for this inappropriateness. . . . But a judgment of the deontic status of the act of deciding on an inappropriate maxim will not automatically yield a judgment of the deontic status of the act done on that maxim. So if we are to find a way of extending Kant's theory of right to contexts of assessment, some further solution to the problem of relevant descriptions is still needed. [Nell (1975), pp. 142-143]

This 'further solution' is simpler than one might think. Undo Kant's slippage back into ontology-centeredness and de-attach the categorical imperative from "the moral law within me" and the "problem of relevant descriptions" vanishes. Kant's error demonstrates the hold ontology-centered habits of thinking, combining with judgments of taste, exerts on human reasoning.

One does not have to be a person of faith to find himself asking those questions that ring out across centuries of human history: "What is all this about? Why am I here? What is the meaning or purpose of life?" In the manifold accidents of life-experience there are legions of ample opportunities for every person to find himself confronted by traumatic events that steer him into experiencing what spiritualists sometimes call "a dark night of the soul." Solon, the lawgiver of Athens, was wise to say, "Until he is dead, do not yet call a man happy, but only lucky."

It is foolishly inadequate and short-sighted to attempt to cope with these enormously frequent occurrences by type-α compensation – which is precisely what is being done in education when the institution determines to ignore this aspect of human social Nature. Public instructional education need not furnish the learner with ready-made answers here. Indeed, it cannot supply such answers and only enormities come from trying to do so. But it can, and is Duty-bound to, prepare the learner with means by which he can deal with his situation in a civically responsible way when these occurrences arise – lest his unpreparedness steer him into the commission of deontological moral crimes against his fellow citizens. Such preparedness is immediately pertinent to lessons of mos maiorum (principles of mores and folkways in congruence with those of the learner's Society) and lessons of vocation in the personal dimension of tangible public

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instructional education (vol. I). When a person encounters occasions in life when he is confronted by transcendent torments, his attempt to cope with them is going to call upon practical rules and abstract moral maxims of the nature called "spiritualist." Perennial Theology provides: (1) a common basis for people who are inclined to look to religion for their answers – and this, census data shows us, is the great majority of all human beings; and (2) a basis for others, of either different faiths or no definable religious faith at all, to understand their situation. To this, public instructional education must further provide experiences that help prepare the learner to deal with personal crises when he is confronted with them. This is why spiritual perennialism must not be extinguished in public instructional education. It is in this where persons of all faiths or no religious faith can find common understanding in something Aquinas wrote in 1273, viz., "Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do," and in something Meister Eckhart taught, namely, "One must not always think so much about what one should do, but rather what one should be. Our works do not ennoble us; but we must ennoble our works."

§ 4.2 The Progressive Education Movement

Although the Dewey-Bode philosophy is generally called "the" philosophy of the Progressive Education Movement (PEM), in historical fact this movement was so riddled with chaotic internal dissensions and contradictory courses of actions and reform proposals one can seriously question if a PEM-PAPE really existed at all (outside of a few "principles" that, as statements of attitudes, do by and large describe the character of reforms attempted by the PEM). Certainly by the late 1920s both Dewey and Bode had become critics of what the PEM was doing. It has become popular among some educators today to say the reformers "misunderstood" Dewey's philosophy. For example, Mirel writes,

Dewey's connection of discipline-based subject matter and pedagogy was brilliant and revolutionary. It offered professors in schools and colleges of education a marvelous opportunity to reach out to their colleagues in the liberal arts to work together in reshaping curricula and teacher education along Deweyan lines. Sadly, this is not what happened. Over the next century Dewey was badly misunderstood. He became a sort of patron saint for teacher educators who wanted to make classrooms more student centered and active, and to make the curriculum more relevant to students' daily lives. But few teachers were as committed as Dewey to making the liberal arts an essential part of this "new education." Many of them took Dewey's critique of the formal and abstract nature of disciplinary knowledge as reason enough to avoid stressing such knowledge – especially at the elementary level. Consequently, beginning in the 1930s, some education school faculty members sought to create their own curricula for elementary schools, curricula that were long on relevance and interest, but short on discipline-based knowledge and information. Far too many of these curricula engaged children, but did not prepare them for more advanced studies. . . . In short, no one seemed to realize the importance of early education in laying a strong foundation for future studies and for life. And so, as the 20th century wore on, the gap between discipline-based content and pedagogy widened. [Mirel (2011)]

Please note carefully that Mirel speaks of "discipline-based subject matter," not "disciplinary education" (education in depth in a single narrow specialty to the exclusion of other subjects). The latter was the destination-Mecca of the utilitarians especially. Eliot wrote,

In my opinion, the right aims, in any room of a primary or grammar school, are to recognize at the beginning of the year, as promptly as possible, the different capacities and powers of the children; to carry them forward, throughout the year, each at his own gait and speed; and to turn them out at the end very much more different in capacity and attainments than they were at the beginning. . . . We all know that children, like adults, are not alike,

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but infinitely different; that the object of education, as of life, is to bring out the innate powers and develop to the highest possible degree the natural and acquired capacities of each individual. [Eliot (1892), pp. 274-5]

"Infinitely different"? Hogwash. Is one child a Martian and another a baboon? Human beings are indeed individual and different; but they are also very much alike in many more things than they are different in others. Note, too, that Eliot refers to "innate capacities" of children. What possible real meaning can this phrase hold? The answer in terms of educational potential is: none at all. The objectively valid innate capacities are the practical processes of mental physics. A child does not bring to school special innate intellectual capacities; he brings with him capacities and know-ledge he has acquired before he ever first set foot in a schoolhouse. Presuppositions of "innate capacities" – and the tying of this occult quality to an unscientific distortion of Darwin's theory of evolution – were two prominent characteristics of the PEM. Eliot goes on to say,

The individuals, in any group of men and women who start together in active life at about twenty years of age, become, through their various work, services, and experience, more and more different as they go on. We expect that at sixty their powers will be very different, having been exercised in unlike fields and in various measure, and that their acquired stores of knowledge and experience will be as different as their powers. . . . Now, the effect of school work on children should be analogous to the effect of life on adults; for school is preparation for life. . . . The best way to avoid undesirable uniformity in schools is to push steadily toward the individualization of instruction by reducing the number of pupils assigned to one teacher. . . . To the individualization of instruction will be added, in time, the careful study of each pupil's temperament, constitution, and mental aptitudes and defects [ibid., pp. 275-6, 285-6].

Whatever else you might think about Eliot – and the man had his good ideas right along with ideas like this one that did great harm to 20th century citizenship education – all admit he was a persuasive speaker and writer. His influence, and not Dewey's, was probably the greatest of any single individual in American educational history since Horace Mann. Despite a certain Émile-like quality in the words above, one reads them and sees the looming shadow the narrowly-educated specialist. Eliot takes it for granted that because people do tend to become specialized in their own affairs this means that specialization of interests and abilities for the sake of specialization is a natural good of some sort. It falsely imports into the pragmatic advantages of the economic division of labor a supposition that extreme specialization of interest and knowledge is not a granulating factor in Society and a source of conflict between ever-smaller mini-Communities of special interests. But it is precisely this.

Such granulation was present in the Progressive Education Movement almost from its beginnings and was certainly evident in 1919 when the Progressive Education Association (PEA) was formed with Eliot as its honorary president. Four suppositions – not all held by all members of the PEA – jointly characterize the Progressive Education Movement. I call them "suppositions" rather than, as is more usually done, "principles" on the ground that none of them, regarded from the perspective of an objectively valid science, merit the title of "principle." They are:

1. Education might become a science with methods and ends that could be measured with precision and determined scientifically;

2. the methods and ends of education could be derived from the innate needs and nature of the child;

3. the methods and ends of education could be determined by assessing the needs of Society and then fitting children for their role in Society;

4. the methods and ends of education could be changed in ways that would reform Society, that the schools could change the social order either by "freeing" children's creative spirit or, conversely, by indoctrination for life in a planned Society. [see Ravitch (2000), pg. 60]

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Let us take these one by one. First, can education become a science? Yes, it can. A science is any doctrine constituting a system in accordance with a disciplined whole of knowledge. A science of public education can only be a social-natural science, if it is to succeed as a science, grounded in objectively valid fundamental principles. (The broader term, "education," takes in a wider scope and includes educational Self-development activities in the absence of a teacher; its methodology contains elements different from and in addition to those required for public education; yet this, too, can be made into a social-natural science). But science does not work by "measuring methods and ends with precision." To think it can or should is Taylorism. Did 20th century progressive educators fail to produce a science because they modeled their efforts on ontology-centered sciences like physics or psychology instead of social-natural science? I find no evidence of anything systematic in the PEM reforms, little or no discipline in their approach, and certainly no unifying idea of any whole of knowledge. There was no experimental validation of methodologies or techniques, no testing of hypotheses, before moving to implement them in schools, nor credible data collection or analysis meeting those norms required by every successful practice of science. There were reports, of course, but these were not credible as scientific evidence. I find only Platonism in their actions, and Platonism never builds a natural science.

It is true that many progressive educators frequently called upon arguments from psychology. However, psychology itself was hardly advanced enough at that time to speak with authority on the range of topical matters vital to the practice of teaching. Furthermore, American psychologists in the early 20th century, particularly Edward Thorndike and G. Stanley Hall, made egregious overgeneralizations from the outcomes of pitifully inadequate studies. In point of fact, most of these false generalizations were later refuted by other studies. However, the progressives tended to embrace and publicize those findings that fit with their preconceptions and pretensions, and to ignore and dismiss those which contradicted them. This is not basing education on science; it is perverting science into a propaganda tool. I find nothing that was scientific about the way the PEM carried out its reforms.

For most of the span of the PEM, American psychology was dominated by American behaviorism, a loose system of mini-theories that eventually failed to achieve its stated intended accomplishments and instead gave way to other hypothetical mini-theories. American psychology became more and more fragmented as the years passed until, in 1994, science writer Morton Hunt came to ask,

Can any discipline so untidy, multifarious, and disorganized be called a science? Are we justified in believing that its statements about human nature and the human mind are scientific truths? [Hunt (1994), pg. 640]

Hunt's bleak question is answered in Reber's Dictionary of Psychology:

Psychology simply cannot be defined; indeed, it cannot even be easily characterized. Even if one were to frame a definition or characterization today, tomorrow would render the effort inadequate. Psychology is what scientists and philosophers of various persuasions have created to try to fulfill the need to understand the minds and behaviors of various organisms, from the most primitive to the most complex. Hence, it really isn't a thing at all [Reber & Reber (2001)].

Nothing answering to this description is a science. It is at best a pre-science. Within this "thing that really isn't a thing at all" there are, indeed, fragments that do constitute special sciences with scopes far more restrictive than "understanding minds and behaviors." Most of these very special sciences did not yet exist during the Progressive Education Movement's era. The progressive educologists individually either did not know what "science" is or they adopted whatever current views the psychology community put forth that they could assimilate into their prejudices.

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Can education be made into a (social-natural) science? Yes. Was it? No. No reform carried out by the PEM moved the topic so much as a single step in that direction and much of what was done had the opposite effect of moving it decisively in the direction of witch doctoring. There was no experimentation to develop effective methods and to check the veracity of findings before putting implementations into effect. If a present day psychologist acted in a fraction of the same manner the progressive reformers acted, he would be hauled up in front of an ethics review panel and justly indicted for unethical practices. There was no theory development basing educational practices on causative factors, nor even any serious effort to uncover what causative factors existed. There was a total absence of the patience and discipline that marks the practice of real science. The movement was a potpourri of quackery, fads, propaganda, and an attempt to place the entire institution under the dictatorship of self-proclaimed "experts" who were in fact not experts at all but who judged themselves superior to the public they were trusted to serve. The progressives claimed their program was scientific, but in fact there is more science employed in the breeding of pigs than there was in anything the PEM sponsored.

Next consider the PEM's second supposition, the basing of educational methodology on "the innate needs and nature of the child." Do children have any innate needs at all? Clearly the answer is yes: air, food, water, shelter, protection from the weather elements (e.g. clothing). These are what are called the physiological needs in Maslow's hierarchy of needs taxonomy. The other six levels in Maslow's taxonomy are: (2) safety needs; (3) belongingness and love needs; (4) esteem needs; (5) cognitive needs (knowledge, understanding, etc.); (6) aesthetic needs; and (7) needs for self-actualization. Other psychological mini-theories propose different taxonomies of needs or redistribute the exemplar needs of Maslow's theory among different classifications, but for purposes of discussion here Maslow's hierarchy – the taxonomy probably most widely known by the greatest number of people – will do as well as any and better than many.

Now, to a psychologist the word "innate" means "that which exists or is potential at birth by virtue of genetic factors" [Reber & Reber (2001)]. Only Maslow's first level, physiological needs, fit this definition without dispute. The word "need" when used in this context by psychologists denotes in a general way "some thing or some state of affairs which, if present, would improve the well-being of an organism" [ibid.]. Beyond this, psychological mini-theories diverge in the classifying of precisely what it is that constitutes a "need." In mental physics a need (Bedürfniß) is anything subjectively necessary for satisfaction of some end or purpose, and this is the only objectively valid Realerklärung of the idea of a psychological need. Because they utterly lacked both any scientific understanding of "genetic factors" and any objectively valid concept of "need" the progressive educators never had even the most remote chance of actualizing their second supposition in any manner congruent with human nature.

What they could do – and did do with appalling success – was take it upon themselves to define "the innate needs of the child" in terms of a host of criteria that: (1) did nothing whatsoever to help the child perfect his or her own Personfähigkeit; (2) did many things to corrode and weaken the corporate Personfähigkeit of American Society; and (3) made it possible for professors specializing in education theory to usurp the power to decide what "role in society" each and every individual pupil was "destined" to fill. This last accomplishment is quite probably the most heinous tyrannical action ever taken in the institution of public instructional education. It was in full and outright violation of the American social contract and put into place a perpetuation of injustice that still characterizes public schooling in the United States to this day. The leaders of the PEM believed the overwhelming majority of all American children – 95% was the propaganda figure most often cited – were "destined" to become wage laborers and to "fit" into American Society in precisely the same economic and social condition as their parents. All of this was done in the name of "democracy" in the perverted context the progressives used that word. William Elson and Frank Bachman, the superintendent and deputy superintendent of public

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schools in Cleveland wrote,

It is obvious that the educational needs of the child in a district where the streets are well paved and clean, where the homes are spacious and surrounded by lawns and trees, where the language of the child's playfellows is pure, and where life in general is permeated with the spirit and ideals of America – it is obvious that the educational needs of such a child are radically different from those of the child who lives in a foreign and tenement section." [Ravitch (2000), pg. 91]

This is nothing but a prescription for establishing a permanent caste system in the United States. Other progressives used the second supposition as the ground for attacking the idea that pupils in the public schools should be taught anything having an intellectual quality and, instead, should be trained in job skills. History, arithmetic, and every other academic skill a person needs to better his own situation in adult life and perfect the powers of his person through educational Self-development were to be denied to all but an elite few who were to be selected by school officials. The great majority of the rest of the pupils were to be steered into job training as future "housewives, household servants, dressmakers, seamstresses, retail merchants, clerks, salesmen, saleswomen, carpenters, delivery boys, steam-railroad men, machinists, painters, book-keepers, waiters, engineers (stationary), chauffeurs, printers, blacksmiths, masons, barbers, messenger boys, plumbers, street-railroad men, telephone operators, iron workers, tailors, teachers (rural school), laundresses, nurses, factory girls" [ibid., pg. 101]12.

All this was to be done in the name of "meeting the innate needs of the child." It went arm in arm with the third supposition, namely that the methods and ends of education could be determined by "assessing the needs of society and then fitting children for their role in society." This came to be called "the social efficiency movement," but it is nothing else than the tyranny of Taylorism. Who were to be the ones tasked with "assessing the needs of society"? This was to be the province of the academic professor of education. What qualified these men for responsibly carrying out this task? Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. It was sheer hubris, self-aggrandizement, and if you want to call it "elitism" go right ahead. After all, the progressives were fond of calling anyone who disagreed with them "elitist" and in name-calling turnabout is fair play.

According to this bigoted policy, American Society had no need to have more than about 5% of schoolchildren graduate from the school system able to read, able to write, or able to do arithmetic. Instead, the school curriculum was to be "differentiated" to "suit the innate needs" of the children as quack "intelligence tests" sorted them into their "destined roles in society." Part of this involved the creation of the junior high school system. American children were to receive a common education (in which they were to be taught nothing to improve their intellectual Person-fähigkeit, their tangible Personfähigkeit, or their persuasive Personfähigkeit) only from kinder-garten to the 5th or 6th grade. After that, they were to be sorted into their respective castes and receive the particular job training schoolmasters had selected them to carry out in adult life. For most pupils, their formal education was to end at the 8th or 9th grade. The American educational ladder, which was based upon the American ideal of equal educational opportunity for all American children, was thus to be perverted into an antisocial tool that could only perpetuate static castes of economic and social stratification in American Society. This was to be done in the name of "social efficiency" – a distinctly Taylorite policy.

The bullheadedness and ignórance with which this policy was campaigned for and effected almost defies understanding. Statistics showing booming enrollments in high school were already

12 cited from Charles Hughes Johnson, "Curriculum adjustments in Modern High Schools," The School Review, November, 1914, pp. 577-590. Johnson was a professor at the University of Illinois and one of the so-called progressives in the early days of the PEM.

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Figure 14.5: Annual number of immigrants (red) and immigrants from nations discriminated against by

progressive educators (blue) in thousands from 1891 to 1970. The dashed black line denotes the percentage of immigrant population comprised of groups discriminated against in regard to education opportunity.

in progress were ignored at the very time these "reforms" were being proposed and fought for by the progressives. Figure 8.20 illustrated how from 1890 to 1920 the number of high school graduates as a percentage of 17-year-olds had climbed from under 4% to reach 16%. By 1940 the percentage of high school aged children (ages 14 to 17 years) who were enrolled in school reached 79.3%; by 1950 it was 83.4%; by 1960 it was 90.3%; and by 1970 it was 94.1% [Bureau of the Census (1976), Series H 445]. The policies of the progressive educators were based upon statistics that were known to be obsolete at the time their reforms started.

In the first half of the 20th century the word "race" was still used to mean the same thing it did in 18th century Europe. This is to say it referred to national and ethnic groups and not merely to the color of one's skin or the shape of one's eyes. People spoke of "the English race, the German race, the Italian race, the French race," and so on. By the 20th century this usage was "justified" in the minds of the progressives by an utterly groundless mythology that somehow held Darwin's theory to show that people of, say, Italian or Mexican ancestry were "determined" to have a particular level of intelligence and intellectual capacity and no more. This was used as a further basis for curriculum differentiation and caste-sorting of people. Many of the leaders of the PEM, Cubberley for example, were xenophobic in the extreme and their reforms were openly prejudicial to immigrants coming into America from places other than Great Britain and northern Europe (particularly Germany and Scandinavia) who were held to be "innately more intelligent and industrious" than Poles, Italians, Greeks, Asians, and others who had not been part of the first waves of immigration to America in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Figure 8.8 illustrated that immigration accounted for from 30% to as high as about 55% of the growth in the U.S. population from 1890 to 1910. The lion's share of these new Americans was made up of people the progressives regarded as racially inferior. Figure 14.5 details these immigration statistics from 1891 through 1970 [ibid., Series C 89-119]. Many of the most prominent leaders of the PEM reacted to the situation with what I will only call xenophobic hysteria. In his widely influential book, Changing Conceptions in Education (1909), Cubberley wrote (pg. 15), "Illiterate, docile, lacking in self-reliance and initiative, and not possessing the Anglo-Teutonic conceptions of law, order, and government, their coming has served to dilute tremendously our national stock, and to corrupt our civic life." This is racism, simple and stupid.

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Progressives saw it as their duty to "rescue" America from this "tremendous dilution of our national stock" by steering the children of these "inferior" people into the sorts of job training that would thereafter condemn them to the same conditions of poverty their parents faced upon arrival in America. This was part of the fourth supposition, i.e., that the methods and ends of education were to be used to reform society. Ravitch characterized the attitude by writing, "Proponents of this idea expected that the schools could change the social order, either by freeing children's creative spirit or conversely by indoctrinating them for life in a planned society" [Ravitch (2000), pg. 60].

Planned by who? Clearly this was not to be done by the nation's Sovereign power – America's citizens – because they were presumed to be not-well-educated-enough to be entrusted with deciding what sort of Society they should want to live in. No, this "planned society" was to be planned by the Taylorite self-styled "experts" who led the Progressive Education Movement.

This premise is hogwash. Furthermore, it is Un-American hogwash because it is in outright contradiction to the American social contract's Ideal of liberty with justice for all.

Do not go down to your local high school or the next local school board meeting and rage against today's teachers and school administrators. No one alive today can be blamed for the institution that emerged from the handiwork of the Progressive Education Movement. If you meet someone who works in education and tries to defend the now-traditions of the PEM, if you are fair-minded you will keep in mind that all of today's teachers and school administrators had to go through the indoctrination process that came to dominate America's colleges of education from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Your community's teachers are highly committed, dedicated people and devoted public servants. They have merely been trained to follow these doctrines. If they do not, they get fired for insubordination. Is that any different from where you work?

Whether this can be said of your local politicians is another matter – one you must decide.

It is not likely you will encounter many who hold the extremism of Cubberley. Furthermore, there are some practices resulting from the PEM that are congruent with human nature and with the American social contract, and these precious few are to be kept alive and nourished. There are not many, it is true, and they are not well instituted; but they do exist. Also bear in mind that many teachers during the 20th century resisted, mainly by passive resistance, the dogma of the progressive college professors and school superintendants13. You should also take this into consideration: When the institution of education is smashed and broken the damage does not last for a day or a school term. It is perpetuated for generations and the broken institution becomes an expected norm even as it continues to perpetrate antisocial enormities against the social contract of the nation. It cannot be quickly repaired. Vilifying innocent people does absolutely nothing to help and instead inflicts further damage to an already broken system. If you are really an American citizen and not just an entitlement citizen, you will want to help repair it, not damage it further and beyond all possibility of repair. Volume III discusses how to help. Do not abet more mob conflict. Your country is at stake, we are running out of time, and we don't need fanatics.

§ 4.3 Essentialism and the Back-to-Basics Counter-reaction

Although both Ravitch and Reese hold that PEM reforms took hold rapidly, Pulliam & Patten disagree with this characterization. In their judgment, the 1920s was a time when conservative and traditional views held sway in public education; the 1930s was the high summer of the PEM as well as the heyday of its radical offshoot, the Social Reconstructionist movement (SRM); the 13 If by now you are wondering how in the world the PEM can be called "progressive," I don't blame you. It was anything but that. However, this is just one more example of the effect of pervasive propaganda and, in particular, the power of naming something with a label that means something else.

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1940s and 50s they characterize as a "back to basics" era; and the 1960s they describe as an era of social engineering in public education. In the here and now it doesn't really matter what precise date one chooses as the tipping point where PEM reforms reduced the score of the American institution of public instructional education to zero in all 24 of its social-natural functions. It is more pertinent to look instead at the resistance that was raised against the movement and why this resistance failed.

At the beginning of the PEM, its first targets were those they disparaged as "perennialists" and the traditional education they promoted. In point of fact, they were taking on those who Hutchins would later disparage as "the drillmasters and dissectors" in college education and they were working to overthrow the false doctrine of mental discipline that dominated education theory in 1890. It cannot be said the PEM was wrong to do so. It can be said that their campaign took on a fanatical overzealousness, and it can be said their malicious propaganda statements, in which they disparaged their various opponents through popular magazines and in various speeches and addresses, was disgraceful. There is nothing quite so socially dangerous as passionate reformers who come together as a mob to make a movement. The mob psychology that results frequently crosses the line between civic reformation and perpetration of deontological moral crimes. So it was with the PEM.

This mob psychology also too often energizes reformers into adopting extreme tactics that swing much too far in the opposite character to that which they propose to change. The reformers race to a reconstructionary extreme (figure 14.1). This was what the PEM did. It was quick to embrace dubious psychological speculations (such as those of Thorndike and Hall) that later proved to be false. It was too quick to introduce questionable innovations into general implementation in the public schools. These had been experimented with by only a few private schools in the 1890s and the first decade of the 1900s without what real science would regard as adequate validation and testing. In its haste, the PEM even failed to properly understand precisely what these innovations would and would not accomplish. They substituted prejudices of child pseudo-psychology in place of facts. According to mental physics as well as later developmental psychology, they greatly misunderstood the child's powers and processes of mental development and greatly underestimated what pupils and students were capable of achieving.

Their frenzied haste to push dubious changes into implementation provoked early opposition to PEM reforms from within their own original utilitarian ranks. The first prominent opponent was William C. Bagley, who can accurately be called "the first Essentialist." Although leading PEM spokesmen came to disparage Bagley as "anti-progressive" and "conservative," in point of fact Bagley's credentials as a reformer stand solidly on their own merits. Bagley favored more gradual evolution, not full-blown revolution, in education reform. He too opposed "the drill-masters and dissectors," and he too opposed the doctrine of mental discipline. He was utilitarian in his view of the proper mission of public education and did not oppose expansion (in contrast to differentiation) in school curricula. In all of this, he was a moderative to anti-conservative type of education reformer who stood in the fuzzy boundary region between liberal and accommodative education reform (figure 14.1). But he also thought the mainstream of the PEM badly misunder-stood the mission and purpose of public education and was badly mistaken in under-appreciating the full scope of public schooling. Ravitch remarked,

At the turn of the century there were two paths American education could take. One was the Committee of Ten's common academic curriculum that would have all high school students – not just the college-bound few – study history and literature, science and math-ematics, language and the arts. The other was the differentiated curriculum, which divided students according to their likely future occupations, offering practical studies for the vast majority and an academic curriculum for only a small minority.

Education reformers [progressives] dismissed the Committee of Ten's proposal of a solid

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liberal education for all youngsters as the last gasp of the reactionary old order. . . . Criticism of the academic curriculum came mainly from two sources: business leaders, who wanted economy and efficiency in the schools, and progressive educators in the nation's new colleges of education, who wanted the school curriculum to be more closely aligned to the needs of society in the industrial age. The business community was primarily interested in securing lower taxes and well-trained workers. Progressive educators wanted socially efficient schools that would serve society by training students for jobs. [Ravitch (2000), pp. 51-52]

Bagley was alarmed by this. He had already, as early as 1907, criticized progressivism for its too-quick tendency to adopt "the waves of fads and reforms that sweep through the educational system at periodic intervals" [Bagley (1907)]. Paraphrasing him from his book, Ravitch writes,

The purpose of schooling, [Bagley maintained], was to prepare children for civilized social life. Youngsters needed to acquire a fund of knowledge and such ideals as "industry, accuracy, carefulness, steadfastness, patriotism, culture, cleanliness, truth, self-sacrifice, social service, and personal honor." [Ravitch (2000), pg 285]

Bagley opposed the all-out and over-specialized curricular changes mainstream PEM reformers proposed. He held that the "educational ladder" (common schooling extending to the 8th grade) was vital to a democratic Society, and that the common education it provided to all students needed to include the liberal arts and sciences because these were necessary to fulfill the duties of good citizenship and to participate fully in American Society. He also strongly believed that the accumulated knowledge so painfully bought and paid for in blood and suffering over many centuries of Western civilization had to be passed on to each succeeding generation, lest these vital lessons of history be forgotten and the hard-won advances of Western civilization disappear in a darkness of ignorance14. As early as 1914 and 1915, he was already speaking out and writing against the PEM's program of reform.

Bagley had allies in some, but not all, of these views. One of the more interesting ones was Michael J. Demiashkevich, a Russian immigrant who had studied and taught in western Europe before coming to the United States. Like Bagley, Demiashkevich supported the maintenance of a common core of "liberal" curricular subject-matter. Unlike Bagley, he was an extremely bookish man who believed, in opposition to Bagley, that public education should pursue a policy of social stratification on behalf of an intellectual elite. In this he was, for all practical purposes, an ally of those PEM reformers who would take it upon themselves to turn what they assumed would be children's "probable occupations" in adult life into a self-fulfilling prophecy wrought by the over-specialized training the public schools' selection process was to see to it they received. His stance on this was so bluntly Un-American that hostility toward his views was guaranteed. The PEM, in contrast, masked their antisocial advocacy of the same thing in democratic-sounding propaganda that, in the majority of cases, these reformers did in fact believe was true. They presumed that children and parents were not competent to judge their own best interests. When Demiashkevich joined with Bagley and five other educators to organize the short-lived Essentialist Committee for the Advancement of American Education in February, 1938, it became trivially easy for PEM propagandists to paint Bagley and Demiashkevich with the same brush.

Bagley had more effective allies – although "alliance" is somewhat too strong a word to use; it is more accurate to say they were sympathetic fellow-travelers than allies – from an unorganized group of school teachers, local school boards, and state legislators who by and large did not

14 This was the core position taken later by the advocates of the Great Books Movement (GBM). The principal difference between them and Bagley's Essentialism was a practical difference; the GBM's principal shortcoming was their failure to develop proposals that could work outside of the colleges.

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belong to either the National Education Association or the Progressive Education Association. These people were skeptical and suspicious of radical reform in public education. Potter describes the consequences of this group's opposition to the more radical of the PEM reforms thusly:

The changes in elementary schools can be more accurately described as changes in attitudes toward children and in the methods of teaching than changes in content. Children still spent most of their time on the basic tool subjects of reading, writing, and arithmetic, with less time devoted to spelling and increasingly more time to social studies or nature study. Music and art or drawing are often taught by visiting teachers, who make the rounds of the schools weekly or other infrequent intervals. Physical education is generally relegated to the free play at recess time or at noon, though some city systems have specialists in elementary-school physical education.

The relative stability in broad areas of content does not mean that educators have not been greatly concerned about what elementary-school children learn. Particularly after 1920 there was a confusing amount of experimentation in elementary curriculum. Actually much of this experimentation might be described as "tinkering," for it was not the result of careful and disciplined research and had little or no truly theoretical basis. . . . Many of the various schemes were internally inconsistent, in sharp conflict with other proposals, and soon went into oblivion [Potter (1967), pg. 377]

One PEM reform that did go into widespread adoption over Bagley's strenuous objection was the breaking-up of the educational ladder by creation of the junior high school. This policy was put forward in 1915 by the NEA Resolution on Junior High Schools; Bagley's was the only voice raised in opposition at the meeting where it was adopted. Potter notes,

Perhaps the most important twentieth-century innovation in school reorganization is the junior high school. In August, 1909, Columbus, Ohio, established a junior high school con-sisting of the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. Since then there has been a steady increase in the number of junior high schools, and a marked trend away from the tradition 8-4 [year] or 7-4 organization to a 6-3-3 or 6-6 organization15. In 1920 there were 13,421 regular four-year public high schools in the United States, making up 93.7 percent of the total number of secondary schools; there were 55 junior high schools, or 0.4 percent. In 1930 there were 16,460 regular high schools, 1,842 junior highs, and 3,287 junior-senior highs. In 1952, for the first time, the number of four-year high schools [in the traditional 8-4 system] was less than half of the total number. In that year there were 10,168 four-year high schools, making up only 42.8 percent; the 3,227 junior highs (13.6 percent), 1,760 senior highs (7.4 percent), and 8,591 junior-senior highs (36.2 percent) made a total of 57.2 percent. In 1959, there were 6,044 (24.9 percent) high schools on the 8-4 system, 1,407 (5.8 percent) high schools on the 6-2-4 system, 1,651 (6.8 percent) senior high schools on the 6-3-3 system, 5,027 (20.7 percent) junior high schools on the 6-2-4 and 6-3-3 systems, and 10,155 (41.8 percent) junior-senior highs on the 6-6 system. [ibid., pp. 375-376]16

Bagley voiced his objection to the creation of junior high schools in the strongest terms. As Ravitch explains (not entirely impartially),

If educators believed that the job of the school was to keep open the ladder of opportunity from kindergarten to the university, their goal was to figure out how to teach mathematics

15 6 years of elementary school, 3 years of junior high school, 3 years of high school or 6 years of elementary school and 6 years of junior-senior high school. 16 Potter cites his sources for these statistics as: the U.S. Office of Education Bulletin (1938, no. 10, p. 257); Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1965, pp. 106 and 127; and the U.S. Office of Education Biennial Survey (1950-52, chapter 5, pp. 22-23). When Potter's book was published in 1967, experimentation in the "middle school" concept was just then beginning in five states.

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and science, history and literature, language and art to children from every kind of neighborhood and home, varying instruction when necessary to help children learn. If, however, educators believed that the job of the school was to provide a different path for the children who were not likely to go to college, their task was to place them in the right program. . . .

One response to this dilemma was the invention of the junior high school, which spread rapidly after 1910. Its advocates believed that the common elementary course should only be six years, followed by three years in which students would be "guided" to the right curriculum for their future occupation. The main effect of the establishment of junior high schools was to reduce the number of years of common schooling from eight to six.

In 1915, the annual meeting of the National Education Association's Department of Superintendence approved a resolution in support of the "tendency to establish, beginning with the seventh grade, differentiated courses of study aimed more completely to prepare the child for his possible future activities." In support of the resolution, U.S. Commissioner of Education Philander P. Claxton said that differentiated curricula would enable large numbers of children to divide their school years equally between school and work.17

The only voice raised in opposition to the junior high school was that of William C. Bagley . . . Bagley warned against early differentiation in the junior high school, which he saw as "a radical step away from our democratic institutions" that would promote social stratification along European lines. The purpose of the junior high school, Bagley charged, was to limit access to a common curriculum, which would mean "the ultimate disintegration of our 'educational ladder' type of organization." Bagley wondered who was clamoring for this reorganization. "Not the 'working people,' one may be confident. What they wish for their children is the opportunity that liberal education implies. . . . Hitherto in our national life we have proceeded on the assumption that no one has the omniscience to pick out the future hewers of wood and drawers of water – at least not when the candidates for these tasks are to be selected at the tender age of twelve." [Ravitch (2000), pp. 92-93]

The way in which junior high schools were instituted did in fact foreclose the ability of public instructional education to fulfill its functions of citizenship education and it did in fact promote social stratification. However, it need not have been this way. Both PEM reformers and Bagley were rigidly "binary-valued" in their thinking, by which I mean both sides saw things in an "either-or" manner that permitted no compromise. But why, one should ask, should every aspect of a common curriculum be abolished in order to make room for job-training elements of education? Or why must all aspects of vocational education be eliminated in order to preserve the liberal education subject-matters necessary to teach learners what it means to be a citizen and to prepare them to deal with the great diversity of mini-Communities they would encounter as adults? The answer, of course, is: there is no reason. The one is not necessarily contradictory to the other. Of course, actually designing a system of public instructional education where these elements are complementary is a challenging task, and the efforts reformers did put into this were insufficient to accomplish the task. They did try to accommodate citizenship education along with job education, but the effort was inadequate. Shortsightedness came out of: stubborn antipathy to anything labeled "liberal" and "traditional"; unscientific presuppositions about "innate powers and abilities" of children; and hogwash misinterpretation of Darwinism by holding that non-British and non-northwest-European people were racially inferior and "diluting the purity, intelligence, and industry" of "the American race."

In the end, Essentialism failed because it wasn't really a movement at all, if by that one means 17 It is worth noting that child labor, including labor by children under ten years of age, was still very much a common industry practice in 1915. Social reformers and the U.S. Congress were at that time struggling to get child labor laws passed, and were running into opposition from the U.S. Supreme Court, which was ruling that Congress did not have the Constitutional power to outlaw child labor.

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an organized body of people holding to the same PAPE. What was missing was "organization." Bagley and Demiashkevich were sadly lacking in persuasive Personfähigkeit and provided no effective leaders' actions capable of nucleating a like-minded mini-Community. They were both as helpless as toddlers in coping with the avalanche of vicious propaganda heaped upon them.

When Bagley died in 1946, the pathetic little Essentialist Committee pretty much died with him. That same year, another small group of non-educators formed a Council for Basic Education to press for knowledge-based curricular subject-matters and a "back to basics" emphasis in public education at all levels. They were joined or tepidly supported by academic specialists in history and the special sciences, whose disciplines were among those criticized and ridiculed by the "progressives." This council, however, likewise did not nucleate a mini-Community and the loose affiliations that come and go in association with it are more accurately described as a group of fellow-travelers traveling together for a brief interlude along the same stretch of self-interests-based highway [Potter (1967), pg. 474; Pulliam & Patten, pg. 51]. If there is any binding principle to be found for them, I can come up with none other than the old Arab proverb: The enemy of my enemy is my friend." For now.

§ 4.4 The Social Reconstructionist Movement

Concrete contributions to public instructional education by the social reconstructionist move-ment (SRM) were minor and were almost entirely limited to the influence of Harold Rugg prior to the mainstream SRM of the 1930s. Although he coined the term "social reconstructionism," Rugg is probably more accurately regarded as a forefather of the SRM rather than its founder. In a similar vein, Brameld was a very minor player in the SRM, his contributions being primarily limited to his philosophy discussed earlier. The person most properly regarded as the "father" of the SRM was George Counts.

In the views of the social reconstructionists of the 1930s, the progressive education movement was neither "progressive" enough nor bold enough to suit them. Prior to the Great Depression, to be a social reconstructionist more or less meant that you were an adherent to the ideas of the child-centered curriculum as these were promoted by Harold Rugg. Rugg's initial training was as a civil engineer, but he went on to study psychology and education. The faculty sponsor for his doctoral dissertation was none other than William C. Bagley. Rugg and Kilpatrick were close allies in the PEM, with Rugg contributing ideas of curriculum reform and Kilpatrick promoting his theory of projects-centered education. Although Pulliam & Patten, Reese, Potter, and Angus & Mirel mention him briefly, only Ravitch reviews in any detail what Rugg's ideas were and what influence he had on the PEM [Ravitch (2000), pp. 190-197].

Rugg is credited with the creation of "social studies" as a curricular "unit." Social studies was aimed at replacing traditional courses in history, geography, and civics with "a unified study of all social sciences." This is a rather tall order, and one that practically necessitates eliminating study in depth of any of these topics. It is also, from the viewpoint of science, a dubious undertaking at best because the abbreviations and abstractions that must come from "unifying" such diverse topics as history, economics, etc. are almost certain to preclude the treatment of any of them as a social-natural science. It is not to be wondered at that by the 1950s most physical-natural scientists, and college students in these disciplines, regarded "social sciences" with a sometimes-high degree of contempt and regarded the "sciences" part of their title as humbug. I suspect that Rugg's concept of social studies, which was heavily influenced by Freudian psychology, was probably a significant factor in getting psychology lumped in with the other topics labeled social sciences universities despite psychology's history of interplay with biology and medical science.

Rugg was a national leader in curriculum reform and an enthusiastic promoter of "child-centered" education. The PEM never did clearly present any unified definition of what it means

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for education to be "child centered," other than a general agreement that "the old education" system was teacher-centered, with the teacher usually portrayed as a drillmaster and harsh disciplinarian. This was a propaganda stereotype that could hardly serve to endear either the PEM or the PEA in the hearts of many of the nation's working teachers. Rugg believed the school teacher was not competent to design a proper curriculum, which he saw as a special science demanding experts to carry it out. These experts were to use their superior specialized knowledge to craft curricula that would serve as "a competent instrument for social improvement." In what precisely this expertise consisted was never made clear. The man had such a high regard for his own opinions as to merit calling it arrogance. Ravitch opined,

His engineering background led him to believe that he could identify the correct answers to problems through careful analysis. Those who failed to see the light, he felt, needed to be educated. Once they learned what he knew, they would see he was right. The great mass of people suffered from cultural lag; they simply didn't yet understand what the experts did. With more time and education, they would understand, and once they understood, they would give their consent. [Ravitch (2000), pg. 196]18

Bagley regarded as ridiculous the notion professors of education, isolated in their academic eyries, were uniquely qualified to determine what would best serve either a child's needs or Society's needs. He promptly proceeded to ridicule the curriculum planning doctrine and the child-centered curriculum publicly at educators' meetings. Ravitch wrote,

Bagley could not resist chiding his fellow curriculum makers by reminding them that the general public "has a very high regard for literacy, both numerical and linguistic" and that it expected the elementary schools to teach the basics as well. The general public continued to hold a "firm faith in certain one-time virtues now generally discredited in our profession – notably 'thoroughness' and 'discipline' (both mental and moral)." The public, in other words, "finds it difficult to understand many of the current proposals for educational reform. . . . If there is a recognizable public demand, it is not at all for what the profession regards as 'progressive' reform. It is rather for simplification and for an emphasis upon materials and processes in which the profession has pretty much lost its faith." [ibid., pp. 192-193]

As usual, PEM leaders ignored Bagley's criticism, although the apparent contradiction – i.e., the idea of an elite ruling caste of educators deciding what the real needs of Society were versus the idea of democracy – was somehow something they managed to reconcile in their thinking. The PEM, and America, would pay a heavy price for this in the 1950s.

In the meantime, Rugg, Kilpatrick, and other PEM leaders succeeded in recruiting the support of local school superintendents for the "child-centered curriculum," and these began to spread through the public school system. A new curriculum set up in the Burlington, Iowa, school

18 So far as I have been able to track down, Rugg never once credited his training as a civil engineer with providing him any sort of special insight or powers that peculiarly suited either himself or other engineers to be better at curriculum design or education theory than other people. It is true enough that engineers have a habit, annoying to professors of education, of pointing out technical problems and shortcomings they find in concrete education proposals. It is a habit that tends to promote among education professors the stereo-type of engineers as Abominable 'No' Men and philistines rather than problem solvers, and gives them an easy satisficing excuse to ignore criticisms of education proposals that come from engineers. They are not always wrong to characterize some specific individuals in this way. However, academic educators often seem habituated to ignoring anyone else's criticisms of their ideas, giving other specialists the idea that professors in colleges of education are thin-skinned and closed-minded. I think it too humorously ironic to resist pointing out to educators that if others outside the college of education are philistines, the educators can credit the differentiated public school curriculum and narrow specialization for that social problem.

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district in the 1920s can serve as a concrete example of what a "child-centered curriculum" looked like [ibid., pp. 192-3]. Traditional courses were replaced by four "units" comprised of: (1) Language Activities; (2) Health and Happiness (comprised of hygiene, natural science, art, music, and 'inspirational literature' – all based on Kilpatrick's 'project method'); (3) Social Sciences (subtitled 'Living Together'); and (4) mathematics and construction (again based on the 'project method'). The basing of these units on Kilpatrick's 'projects method' ensured that no theory or general principles were taught in regard to any of these topics. It was a curriculum worthy of the scribes of ancient Egypt before the advent of Greek mathematics – other than for the fact the Egyptian scribes wrote down the solutions to geometry and other problems, to teach what was accomplished to later generations, whereas the Burlington school children did not.

Under the "child-centered curriculum" doctrine, subject-matter was to receive the minimum possible emphasis, if it was not eliminated altogether. Specific 'units' and 'activities' were to be derived immediately from "children's interests." However, PEM reformers treated this idea of 'children's interests' as if it were a primitive notion with a meaning self-evident to one and all. It is not, and here is one area where the PEM's ignoring of the details of Dewey's theory led to practices that were contradictory to what Dewey and Bode had said. As the PEM never clarified specifically what "children's interests" were, to grasp a concept of what "children's interests" meant to the PEM we only have recourse to looking at what Rugg's curricular reforms did. For example, all little boys of that era liked to play the game of marbles, but no curriculum included a "marbles playing" unit. Here was a "self evident" childish interest; why didn't the curriculum recognize it and include it? The answer, of course, is not complicated. Marble-playing had no "social utility" (no jobs for marble shooters) and, therefore, no place in a "scientific" curriculum.

One fatal short-sightedness of all PEM child-centered curricula was the dogmatic insistence of the 'progressives' that every subject had to have "immediate value in a student's life." However, the PEM failed to grasp Dewey's concept of "value" and likewise failed to comprehend that Deweyan "value" was merely an attention and interest attracting means for getting a child to focus on the intended topic [Bode (1921), pp. 22-41]. It was a tactic, not a topic. By the end of the 1920s, both Dewey and Bode were criticizing the PEM's implementation of "the child-centered curriculum" and, like Bagley, they were being ignored by the movement.

A second fatal short-sightedness of the curriculum reform was that, like the "old curriculum" the PEM so viciously criticized, it was based on presumption of a static socio-economic model of Society. That is a fatal weakness of all general educational programs predicated on training the learner for "job skills" rather than on preparing him to deal with a world in which economic and social circumstances are constantly in flux. This short-sightedness is all the more remarkable when juxtaposed against the progressives' searing criticisms of "the old curriculum" as too rigidly rooted in the past and irrelevant to "the modern scientific industrial world."

My students today, who have never known a world not powered and dominated by electricity, do not grasp that this America came into being in the time of their fathers' grandfathers. They are intellectually aware that "long ago" things were "primitive" but it never occurs to them there was ever a time when people used anything but flush toilets (at least this never occurs to my students born in this country). It never occurs to them that lighting an oil lamp, like they see in westerns, does not illuminate an entire room (the way Hollywood backlights do). This deeply ingrained presupposition – that the past was like the present and the future will be like today – is commonplace and does not practically differ from the amazement expressed by the little Ugandan baseball players who competed in the 2012 Little League World Series in Williamsport, PA. These eleven-year-olds were stunned to discover that in America the water that gushes from drinking fountains is not brown. It also does not differ from shocked reactions some Americans had when they learned that in these kids' homeland it is. This phenomenon – that the young child thinks the world began when he did and has always been the way it is now – is something Piaget

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decisively documented in his research. Its lingering-on into adult life is merely an example of adult re-staging of earlier maxims of thinking that he originally developed in childhood.

The Great Depression was a shock to this satisficing mode of thinking, and many progressive educators achieved a re-equilibration from it by blaming its hardships on the capitalist system – which they tended to mistake for the uncivic free enterprise born in America during the Economy revolution of the 18th century. Long before the stock market crash in 1929, one of the most radical members of the PEM had begun preparing the groundwork for the radicalization of PEM reforms and the factional breakaway of what came to known as the "real" movement of social reconstructionism in the 1930s. This person was George Counts, who had been claiming that "the educational structure" was dominated by "the business culture" as early as 1918. He had contemptuously called the "Cardinal Principles" of the 1918 NEA report "mere platitudes" [Reese (2011), pg. 193]. This was regarded as a major heresy at the time19.

Except by Ravitch, Counts gets only brief mention by the other historians cited here. This is likely because he actually made no significant concrete contributions to any education reform that took place in the 20th century. His principal effect was to militantly politicize the process, provoke public and political backlash against the whole progressive movement, and split the movement itself right down the middle. Ravitch (pp. 210-218) provides a more or less detailed description of Counts' views and activities.

Counts was much attracted to and influenced by the soviet system20 in the U.S.S.R., which he toured as a middle-aged man in 1929. Rather naively, Counts thought that the State Planning Commission, rather than the Communist Party and the Supreme Soviet, ruled the U.S.S.R. Like many Americans among the financially secure so-called liberals of the 1930s, he thought Stalin was not a dictator and he mistook the propaganda of the Russian Communists for the reality of communism. Consequently, Counts became a strong advocate of social planning under central control like that which was set up in the U.S.S.R. He also advocated ending "capitalism," a word he misunderstood to mean what Marx' writings redefined it as rather than what it actually is and always has been. He favored creating a "socialized" economy and criticized the PEM for having no abiding loyalties to or deep convictions about anything of real social importance.

In the 1930s, most of the prominent progressive educators came to agree that the traditional academic curriculum "reflected the failed capitalist order" and that "a radical change to the social order required equally sweeping changes in the schools." Competitive individualism, they held, had failed and must be replaced by collectivism and cooperation: grades, honors, and competition in school appealed to the same selfishness as the profit motive and must be abandoned; educators must take responsibility for shaping children's social, moral, and cultural values; children must engage in activities that expand their social and political consciousness. Educators had "a special responsibility" to teach children "the ability and desire to think collectively" [Ravitch (2000), pg 218]. So went the doctrine of a group of reformers who themselves fairly regularly exhibited an inability to think collectively, a vulnerability to propaganda, an inability to cooperate with critics, and a propensity for attacking the personal character, motives, and intellect of their opponents. Mali principii malus finis, and so it did in this case.

None of the academic educators radicalized by the miseries of the Great Depression were able to explain how educators had come by such sweeping powers and duties in a democracy, much less why the public should be inclined to pay for a school institution dedicated to denying the citizen his civil liberties. Those within the PEM who came to subscribe to these views ceased to be "progressives" and became social reconstructionists. However, this movement cannot be

19 Refer to note 11 in figure 14.2. 20 The Russian word "soviet" means "council" or "body of delegates."

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characterized as an education movement but, rather, was a political one [ibid., pp. 218-224]. The SRM was never anything else, despite the fact that its academic members directed their attention to perverting the schools into instruments of social revolution for an ant-like communism similar to the one proposed by Plato.

The opening salvo in the schism that took place within the PEM was fired by Counts at its annual meeting in 1932. His speech, which eventually emerged in the form of a book, Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order?, stunned the delegates and stirred hot debates among them. While many of them seemed willing to respond to Counts' challenge, they found themselves unable to agree on what to do. Rugg and even Kilpatrick joined Counts' social reconstruction crusade, and young Theodore Brameld (who was 28 years old in 1932) became the philosopher of the movement. Other PEM members, however, did not share Counts' revolutionary fervor. The SRM's doctrine failed rather spectacularly with the nation's corps of public school teachers, much as the socialist-communist labor movement failed in the face of opposition to it by the American Federation of Labor under Samuel Gompers [Muravchik (2002), pp. 236-248].

The one thing the SRM did accomplish was to provide ample propaganda fuel for a great public backlash against PEM reforms beginning shortly after World War II. The review of this backlash belongs to the next chapter, so I will not go into it now. However, I am not inclined to be the least bit charitable toward the social reconstructionist movement. The movement's aims were, from the very beginning, in egregious violation of the American social contract. It, far more than the bad-enough elitist fervor of the PEM, put itself in direct conflict with the Sovereign power of the United States – that is, the body politic of U.S. citizens – and for that reason I have no problem with or hesitation in calling the SRM thoroughly Un-American21.

§ 5. Chapter Summary

I do not devote a special section to the Great Books Movement in this treatise. The movement has had very little effect on the American institution of public instructional education. Its only effects were: (1) to rouse the ire and vitriol of members of the PEM and SRM, who chose to closed-mindedly ignore everything its proponents had to say and mount against its spokesmen vicious character assassinations through a propaganda campaign that by normal American mores can be called nothing else than disgraceful; (2) to produce the publication of a set of books by Encyclopædia Britannica called the Great Books of the Western World, along with an annual yearbook called The Great Ideas Today and a ten-volume self-study guide for adults called The Great Ideas Program; and (3) Great Books programs established at a few colleges. The PAPE of the Great Books Movement is not perennialism22 – the PEM's favorite denunciation – and is more closely attuned to the PAPE of the Essentialists. However, Great Books advocates never have succeeded in making concrete proposals having any practical likelihood of success for non-collegiate public instructional education. For those reasons, I think the occasional coverage given to it in previous pages is sufficient for the purposes of this treatise.

The first half of the 20th century was the last era of any practically meaningful reform that has taken place in the institution of public instructional education. As I discuss in the next chapter, the latter half of the 20th century up to the present has been a continuation of conflict, and it has seen the infliction of a number of partial measures affecting this or that aspect of the institution. None

21 The word "Un-American" has taken on a thoroughly "politically incorrect" connotation ever since the hysteria of McCarthyism in the late 1940s and early 1950s. By "Un-American" I mean nothing more and nothing less than "acting in contradiction to or violation of the American social contract." By this definition the actions of McCarthy were likewise thoroughly Un-American. 22 Hutchins was originally a perennialist. Through educational Self-development, he became a convert to the Great Books and the leading spokesman of the movement [Ravitch (2000), pp. 298-307].

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of these, however, have produced any structural or fundamental changes in the institution or had the effect of making the slightest improvements to it overall. By the 1950s the "scorecard" for the institution had been reduced to zero or near-zero in all twenty-four basic functions of public instructional education, and before the end of the 1960s the score was zero in every category.

Yet the 20th century era of reforms did start off on a hopeful note. Every single one of the PAPEs, with the exception of the SRM, had its meritorious points in addition to its demerits. Brameld's philosophy has its good points as well as its naïve and poor ones. I have no doubt or hesitation in affirming that every one of the PEM, Essentialist, and Great Books advocates, as well as now-nearly-forgotten objective "perennialists," had the highest, purest, and most noble intentions and the most sincere convictions that the reforms they proposed were in the best interests of the nation and of its children. One can reasonably well call it tragic that human nature displayed in the mob psychology of popular movements so often leads to the corruption of the movement's original ideals as its people find themselves facing practical hindrances and the non-Platonic realities that attend the social dynamics in every Society comprised of divers mini-Communities with contrary special interests.

In its origins, the Progressive Education Movement held a vision of re-making education into a science, through which effective and workable improvements and Progress in public education would be possible. The movement even had the benefit of a more or less sound philosophy – the Dewey-Bode applied philosophy of education – to use as a starting point. Unfortunately, the envisioned science was presumed rather than developed. PEM reformers adopted satisficing measures rather than choosing to act according to well known precepts employed in the real practice of empirical science. They jumped from fad theory to fad theory in impatient thrusts to, in a manner of speaking, try to bring an educational Utopia into being. In the process, they lost sight of their ideals, failed to first comprehend the implications of the applied philosophy they believed themselves to be acting in accord with, and forgot the most basic and essential elements of the American social contract. Personalities and hubris came to sway the movement, and those who objected to many of its details were viciously slandered. Taylorism promoted elitism, a wholly unjustifiable hubris, and an attempt to establish oligarchic rulership over public education.

A good scientist would, in contrast, investigate the details of the objections and assess the scope of their merits rather than acting precipitously on subjective judgments of taste. Science practiced with professional discipline for the most part works; in the face of empirical contradictions to its theories its scholarship is persistent. Science when practiced without professional discipline and detachment is not science at all; it is pseudo-science. The reform era just reviewed was an era of pseudo-science.

In all of this, the reformers reenacted through mob psychology the same tired old melodrama staged again and again in the history of humanity as far back as the historical record takes us. In every era, with the exception of dark ages, people have always tended to presume they lived in a modern, more enlightened, and more intelligent era than their predecessors lived in. During dark ages, the tendency is to venerate authority figures from the past in mythic proportions, and to accept without critical examination, and as superior to their own judgments, whatever is reputed to have been the ancient wisdom as this has been passed down by whatever traditions. The 20th century education reforms did not emerge from a dark age, and consequently its first act was one of disregard and disrespect for hard-won lessons from the past. These, most reformers held, were out of date, out of step with the modern world. Those who demurred from this ungrounded and hasty presumption were labeled "perennialists." The reformers thus came to worship at last at what Francis Bacon in 1620 had called "the idols of the market." Bacon wrote,

The idols of the market are the most troublesome of all, those namely which have entwined themselves round the understanding from the associations of words and names.

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For men imagine that their reason governs words, while, in fact, words react upon under-standing; and this has rendered philosophy and the sciences sophistical and inactive. Words are generally formed in the popular sense, and define things by those broad lines which are most obvious to the vulgar mind; but when a more acute understanding or more diligent observation is anxious to vary those lines, and to adapt them more accurately to nature, words oppose it. Hence the great and solemn disputes of learned men often terminate in controversies about words and names, in regard to which it would be better . . . to proceed more advisedly in the first instance, and to bring such disputes to a regular issue by definitions. Such definitions, however, cannot remedy the evil in natural and material objects, because they consist themselves of words, and these words produce others without end; so that we must necessarily have recourse to particular instances, and their regular series and arrangement . . .

The idols imposed upon understanding by words are of two kinds. They are either the names of things which have no existence (for as some objects are from inattention left without a name, so names are formed by fanciful imaginations which are without an object), or they are the names of actual objects, but confused, badly defined, and hastily and irregularly abstracted from things. . . . And this [first] species of idols is removed with the greater facility, because it can be exterminated by the constant refutation or the desuetude of the theories themselves. The others, which are created by vicious and un-skillful abstraction, are intricate and deeply rooted. [Bacon (1620), pp. 31-32]

If the progressive reformers had known and heeded Bacon's caution, it is possible the out-comes of the 20th century educational reforms might have borne better fruit and taken positive steps forward to achieving the vision that launched the movement. But they either did not know or choose to ignore, as "perennialism," Bacon's warning. In either case, the movement failed to achieve its purposes, and these original purposes themselves were lost or subordinated to more immediate special purposes aimed at getting pet theories and ungrounded practices actualized in America's public schools. Santayana wrote, "Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." The 20th century reformers made themselves fanatics. Their fanaticism provoked counter-fanaticism, and that is the topic of the last chapter.

§ 6. References

Angus, David L. and Jeffrey E. Mirel (1999), The Failed Promise of the American High School 1890-1995, NY: Teachers College Press.

Bacon, Francis (1620), Novum Organum, NY: P.F. Collier and Son, 1901.

Bagley, William C. (1907), Classroom Management: Its Principles and Techniques, NY: Macmillan.

Berkeley, George (1734), The Analyst: A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician, in The Works of George Berkeley, vol. 3, pp. 17-60, Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 1994.

Blake, Raymond J. (1961), A History of Education Through Time Lines, Palo Alto, CA: The National Press.

Bloom, Allan (1987), The Closing of the American Mind, NY: Simon & Schuster.

Bode, Boyd H. (1921), Fundamentals of Education, NY: The Macmillan Co.

Bureau of the Census (1965), The Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present, Stamford, CT: Fairfield Publishers, Inc.

Bureau of the Census (1976), The Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present, NY: Basic Books, Inc.

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Cubberley, Ellwood Patterson (1919), Public Education in the United States: A Study and Interpretation of American Educational History, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co.

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