Dare the School Build a New Social Order?

Two days ago I commented on the Farmington high school international affairs class. I thought it might be profitable to write more generally on progressive education. The headline above is the title of collection of three papers written by George Counts. Counts began as a student of John Dewey, and advocated shifting the focus of education from the curriculum to the student. In 1931, his examinations of foriegn (non-American) school systems led him to Soviet Russia. That year he wrote The New Russian Primer, Soviet Challenge to America and, A Ford Crosses Soviet Russia. It is the following year that he presented Dare the School Build a New Social Order? where ever he could get a hearing. It was an age in which many idealists where infatuated with the Soviet experiment, and many continued to be despite growing evidence of Soviet totalitarianism. Counts had become commited to social reform on the Marxist model. Dewey's own 1920 book, Reconstruction in Philosophy had advocated a role for the schools in progress, but his emphasis had been on democratization of teaching methods, not social revolution.

A whole group, known as the "Frontier Thinkers" (click here for a somewhat alarmist account) formulated a social reconstructionist model of education and set about advocating using to schools to create a new social order. Needless to say, it didn't take. The Frontier Thinkers had their hayday when interest in and acceptance of the Soviet experiment was at its hight. When the WWII alliance collapsed and America fell into its second Red Scare, the communists, their sympathizers, and fellow travelers went under ground. As support for the 1948 candicacy of Henry Wallace reveal, there was a small, determined minority who wanted to continue to learn from the Soviet experience. More importantly, perhaps, similar thinkers in Europe in the Frankfurt School continued to carry the torch. They felt free to modify Marxism, rejected direct obedience to Moscow, but kept historical materialism central to their thinking. European radicals took education as indoctrination much more seriously than Americans did.

As the New Left took hold in both America and Europe in the mid to late sixties, there was a resurgence of social reconstructionism as a vogue in American education. A nice description can be found in The New Republic's article "The Passion of Joschka Fischer" (scroll down about half way) of such a venture in Germany. As resistance to the Reagan military build-up and both Gulf Wars have revealed, the New Left destroyed itself electorally, but not as a social movement. The New Left included in its ideology the notion that revolutionaries belonged in schools, welfare offices, and advocacy groups advancing the revolution even when not in the street. As the New Left lost the Vietnam War as a cause, it embraced enviromentalism and consumer protection as causes. Both had the advantage of being easily used for anti-capitalist purposes. It is no coincidence, for example, that Earth Day is Lenin's birthday.

The social reconstructionists as educators take the whole New Left agenda into the classroom. Fundamentally distrustful of bourgeois society, anti-capitalist, sure that the foriegn policy of capitalist countries is 19th century Imperialism with a new set of clothes, sympathetic to the under-dog like the PLO, Vietcong, Black Panthers, or IRA, and therefore fundamentally at odds with most Americans who never really embraced to socialism, even as practiced by western Europeans. Social reconstructionists want to vote for Dennis Kucinich, but might feel the weight of pragmatism and go with Howard Dean. If Dean doesn't get the nomination, or if pragmatism doesn't bite, its the Green party that gets their vote. They see the schools as a fundamental part of their social reconstruction, and have no difficulty pushing their own view on students despite the fact that their views are distinctly unpopular. In subjects like math and science, their influence is mostly, like Dewey, in the form of teaching methods and classroom enviroment. In literature, they select the polar opposite of the "great books" looking for the voices of the disenfranchised. Women, people of color, the poor, and authors from outside the country are sought out. However, it is in the social studies where the social reconstructionists have the most to alter in the classroom. History and social analysis are taught from a hard left or new left perspective, again the indiginous people are celebrated and the Europeans are condemed (until they lose their empires and embrace socialism), capitalism is portrayed as a poverty creating earth destroying system, and the American political system is described a corrupt and controlled by malevolent elites.

A great deal of such teachers are "soft" social reconstructionists. They picked up their ideology in college, and colleges of education are often more social reconstructionist than public schools are - indoctrinate the indoctrinators. They haven't examined their assumptions with rigor, and can generously be seen as the character from the Alicia Silverstone movie Clueless, Miss Toby Geist, who is always shown trying to get the students involved in various causes. A small minority of teachers are "hard" social reconstructionists, who are committed and can usually point to some defining moment when they realized the system was corrupt and embraced social reconstruction. Here is an example.

Given the rather abundant evidence that the examples of socities admired by social reconstructionists are failures on a variety of measures, this can be regarded as a pernicious philosophy of education. Society can improve itself, and a certain awareness of the social issues raised by this philosophy is appropriate to a classroom. However, if teachers were ever successful in undermining student's broader commitment to American institutions, to republican government (rule by elected representatives), and capitalism, the consequences globally would be catastrophic. Parents and community leaders need to pay closer attention to what goes on in the classroom. A large number of the "soft" social reconstructionists would do little harm, would probabaly do some good, and would not need to be purged, if parents and community leaders simply held them accountable to present broader values (community, state, and national) along side their own agendas in a fair and balanced way. Some of the more extream stuff needs to be saved for college, and some soft, and probabaly all hard social reconstructionists would be unwilling to make these changes. They are more than just a "fifth column" of European style social democrats. They are to the left of the social democrats, and represent a greater danger to the progress and prosperity produced by American capitalism and democracy.

Update: See a libertarian view of Counts here.