Perennialists and Essentialists in Education

Having covered Social Reconstructionism a few days ago, I now turn to Perennialism and Essentialism. Depending on how broadly one wanted to group educational theory, Perennialism and Essentialism could be identified as a single theory based on the great books and engaged in transmitting the Western tradition. I, however, will argue that it is more useful to regard them as two related theories, Essentialism being an offspring of Perennialism. The Perennialist tradition goes back to Scholasticism. Its is still with us, though I think its bastions are in academia, Catholic parochial schools, and in the practitioners of the liberal arts who embrace the dead white male. Perennialism is not a theory interested in content, its a process oriented theory. You go through a course of education designed to sharpen and prepare the mind so that no problem, social, political, philosophical, scientific, or what have you, remains elusive to the educated person. Its fundamental purpose is to create critical thinkers who know who to reason reliably, who are familiar with past problems and their solutions as a guide to confronting future problems. Study of the great books, the Western canon, is the most effective way of producing such an education.

Perennialism's basic assumptions were not altered by the rise of Humanism. The Humanists shifted the emphasis in education, but they agreed with the Scholastics in the fundamentals - the purpose of education lay in teaching students how to think. The first great challenges to this notion arrived when education began to shift from an elite endevour to a mass instituition. In Europe and America, advocates for working people saw the Perennialist education as suitable for gentleman (and hence outdated in societies of mass participation, mass governence, and modern character). They advocated a new theory of education we now call vocational education, namely that school should prepare you for a trade (anything from carpentry to phyiscs to adverstising). Here the idea was, and is, that you need not study history, the history of ideas, or how to reason universally. You needed to solve specific problems tied to your profession or craft, and to learn the problems and methods of your profession or craft alone. The ability to sit back and reflect on he nature of things was regarded by the vocational advocates as impractical. From this movement, along with other intellectual challenges to the Western tradition, such as Pragmatism and Socialism, emerges John Dewey. Dewey changed two fundamental things in the school, its model of the classroom and its curriculum. The classroom, in Dewey's view was to be democratic and practical. The hierarchical model of the old (Perennialist) school, Dewey regarded as undemocratic, and its tradition, indoctrination. Rather than viewing the teacher as an expert in the classical texts, someone who would supervise and facilitate learning. Where the Perennialists saw the Western canon as the best pedagogical tool, Dewey favored projects, especially group projects, with a practical application of useful and relevant knowledge aquired by direct experience. Dewey was a leader in educational theory and provided an alternative to Perennialism that included an intellectual challenge to Perennialist assumptions. He taught at both the University of Chicago and Columbia University, where much of American educational theory has been produced. Some of his followers went to to become the Social Reconstructionists. Other followers, who remained closer to Dewey's own approach remained outsiders until the 60's and 70's when it might be possible to say they where the leading theory of education. While Dewey's approach waned in the face of Essentialism, many of its assumptions, especially on the practical and experientian nature of learning, remain part of many teacher's understanding regardeless of their broader theoretical approach.

In responce to the followers of Dewey and the Social Reconstructionists, there arose a reaction that wanted a return to Perennialism, or a modified Perennialism. These are the Essentialists. They come in two varieties. One kind is academic and looks a lot like the Perennialists, except that they are self-consciously engaged in restoring the Western tradition to its proper place, against the threats of its intellectual challengers. The Perennialits today are largely engaged in advocating the Great Books, a rigorous and critical approach to reasoning, and the transmission of the Western tradition. The Essentialists want to do that all the while combating the influence of Dewey and his followers, especially the Social Reconstructionists. As such, they have gotten political. They advocate in the political arena for the codification of an approach that supports the Western tradition. Its very hard to codify critical thinking, so the regulations handed down, mostly by state departments of education, tend to require certain facts or ideas be learned. To verify this learning, Essentialists have embraced an invention never interesting to the Perennialists- standardized testing. Essentialists are the great testing advocates. Its not sufficient to require the Great Books be included in the curiculum because Social Reconstructionists will deconstruct them to make the point they want to anyway. Hence, it is neccesary to make sure ideas taht are part of the Western tradition are transmitted too. Standardized testing in this regard has made considerable advances in the past decade. Once largely confined to multiple choice testing, current testing now asks students to explain their answers, and so hopes to encourage critical thinking as well. Many teachers today are remote from the Perennial tradition and are at a loss to 'teach to the test' because it doesn't require coverage of a discreet body of facts, but wants students to engage in ideas. This is because Essentialists have their roots in the Perennialist interest in knowing how to reason.

There is another group of Essentialists, and these are the non-academic, unintellectual (not neccesarily anti-intellectual, but there is some of that), who have no deep connnection to the Great books, but see that the Social Reconstructionists as well as the the Dewey methods are not transmitting their values, and sometimes seems to reject their values. So they construct a remembered past. They were taught under some variety of Perennial theory, but don't have any working understanding of the theory, its assumptions, or purpose. They want their values and the Western tradition taught. They oppose the values and purposes of the Left in education. So they favor testing, prefer teachers who are authorities in their fields, and who teach the facts, not subjective interpretations. The fact, for example, that Platonists and Aristotelians (you may know them as Rationalsts or Empiricists) will disagree, is an esoteric quibble. They don't want they world turned upside down so that the American people is evil and its enemies are heroes. They don't want traditional social roles inverted. They don't want queer theory in the schools. They want patriotism, they want conservative social values, they want democracy and capitalism taught in the schools. They want they produce of the Western tradition. They are less concerned about how we got here. This second wing of the Essentialists is a large, politicized group of parents who mobilized as a part of the New Right in the 1970's to take American back from the Left, both the Old and New Left. During the 1980's the Essentialists won politically, producing far larger numbers of supporters in American society than any rival theory. While the intellectual leadership of the Essentialists comes from academics or other kinds of intellectuals, such as Allan Bloom and William Bennet, whose programs are largely Perennialist, the success of the Essentialists rests with mobilized middle America. Essentialists of both kinds fear that the other theories of education (mostly Dewey and the Social Reconstructionists, since they are the main alternatives) have diluted the quality of education by focusing on everyday experience or social reconstruction and produced children who can't even read or write. They want to abandon the school as a labratory for democracy or socialism and get 'back to basics'. Teach students to read and write, to have basic competencies in basic knowledge of the language and history, or math and science, and many Essentialists are satsified. They might want excellence, but its excellence in basic skills. Other Essentialists still regard excellence as including critical thinking and a working knowledge of the whole history of the Western tradition, not just its present.

Interestingly, while the broader culture is strongly Essentialist, and a fair (though minority) portion of the academy is Perennialist, these two theories are rare in the public school. They are largely imposed from outside by the political process or social pressure. I have mentioned in earlier posts that teachers tend to run the whole political spectrum, but they don't generally embrace testing, critical thinking of the classical model (debate teachers aside), a canon of great books, or the socratic method. Further, few of them could claim to be authorities in their subject area. The dominant theory held by most teachers is some species of Dewey's philosophy. Its based on the interests of the child (make it relvent to the learner) not on some objective assessment of what the student ought to know. Learning should be a hands on process of experimentation during the course of projects, especially cooperative group projects. And that, as Rouseau supposed, children will learn on their own what they need to know and will develope into the people they need to be. All a teacher has to do is facilitate the process.