Written by Don Closson
Introduction
On its surface, the process of educating our children appears to be
fairly straightforward. First, you must determine what kind of person
you want to produce at the end of their formal schooling. In other
words, decide what it means to be an educated person. Then, you
establish what knowledge and attitudes will accomplish this goal. Next,
hire an administrator who has the ability to pull together all the
necessary components; someone who knows the best, scientifically
verified, teaching techniques and the best optimum environment for
implementation. Finally, give the principal or headmaster the authority
to hire gifted teachers who can successfully do the job or to fire
teachers who cannot. There’s only one problem with this simple formula:
educators disagree on how to complete every one of these steps. To make
matters worse, education is one of the most expensive responsibilities
that our government fulfills.
In the last forty years, spending in the U.S. on K–12 education has
more than doubled. In 1970 it was $221 billion; by 2008 it rose to $556
billion in constant dollars.{1}
During that forty year period, enrollment has changed very little,
rising from about fifty–one million to fifty–three million students. So
essentially, spending today is twice the amount we spent in 1970 on
about the same number of students. Naturally, one would expect to see
significant gains in learning for that money. However according to the
National Assessment of Educational Progress Scores, not much has
changed. For the last forty years scores have remained flat. Reading
scores for seventeen–year–olds have remained at 285 out of 500, and
mathematics scores went from 300 to 306, a minor improvement.{2}
Many argue that the reason we are not making progress in our schools
is that we are using the wrong playbook. Because our educational leaders
have bought into a philosophy of education based on a faulty view of
human nature, they have endorsed techniques in the classroom that have
marginal impact at best. This situation has not gone on without being
contested. Historians of education point to a struggle going back to the
beginning of the twentieth century between two factions that have very
different ideas about what it means to be human and what the goal of
education should be. Most Americans would be surprised to learn that
there has been a century–long struggle between two distinct ways of
thinking about how to educate our children.
In what follows we will look at the opposing worldviews of these two
education camps and consider how their struggles have impacted our
children. Join us as we look at the effect of what might be called the
Hundred Years War in American education.
Progressive Orthodoxy
Education historian Diane Ravitch argues that at the end of the
nineteenth century, America was facing two possible educational paths.
One path led to an academic curriculum consisting of history,
literature, science and mathematics, language, and the arts for all high
school students. The other path endorsed a vocational emphasis for
most, and an academic training only for a few.
Criticism of the academic curriculum came from pragmatic business
leaders and faculty members of our newly formed colleges of education
that had recently sprung up across the nation. These so–called
“progressive” educators felt that schools should be focused on the needs
of society and students rather than centered on the traditional content
of an academic curriculum. This emphasis on making school more
practical and student–centered reflects the thoughts and writings of
Jean Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau is considered by many to be one of the
most influential thinkers on educational philosophy in Western culture.
His book Emile, written in 1762, offered an extremely
child–centered educational method in response to the traditional
content–focused curriculum of the day.
Rousseau’s educational methods sprung from his faith in a particular
worldview. One critical aspect of this worldview is that Rousseau
believed that humans are “good” and that they naturally worship their
Creator.{3}
He also argued that all we need to know about God can be learned from
nature; any other source, including the Bible, would be seeking man’s
opinion and authority which always turns out to be destructive. Rousseau
thanked God for making him free, good, and happy like God himself.{4}
Regarding education, it’s not surprising that Rousseau valued freedom
above all else. He wrote, “The truly free man wants only what he can do
and does what he pleases. That is my fundamental maxim. It need only be
applied to childhood for the rules of education to flow from it.”{5}
The result of Rousseau’s worldview is predictable. The child, rather
than his teacher, knows best how to learn and what to learn. This
student–centered approach leads Rousseau to a strong opinion about books
and reading. He brags that, “At twelve, Emile will hardly know what a
book is.” He adds, “I hate books, they only teach one to talk about what
one does not know.”{6} His Emile will learn from life itself but only when the need for such learning comes from within.
For Rousseau, natural man is always superior to civil man and
love of oneself is always good. This focus on freedom and student
centered learning would influence educators for centuries and would find
a warm reception in the minds of American educators in the progressive
education movement.
Rousseau’s Disciples
It’s ironic that the most prestigious college of education in
America, Teachers College at Columbia University, began as the Kitchen
Garden Association in 1880 with the goal of training young girls to work
as cooks and housemaids. Later, carpentry was added to attract boys
and, as a result, the name was changed to the Industrial Education
Association. In 1887 it was renamed the New York College for the
Training of Teachers, and five years later just Teachers College. The
opening of Teachers College marked the birth of the progressive
education movement in America.
If Teachers College was the birthplace of progressive education, John
Dewey was its father. Dewey was probably the most influential of all
American philosophers and had an immense effect on how we think about
education as a nation. He saw schools as a tool for social reform, and
the goal of this reform was to replace Christianity with a new secular
religion of democracy. To accomplish this goal, schools should turn from
the traditional curriculum that encouraged abstract thinking and
handing down the best ideas of Western Civilization, and instead base
their activities on the needs and experiences of children in the home
and community. Children should study problems and processes that mean
something to them. Shop work, sewing, and cooking were a greater need
than ancient languages, mathematics, history, or theology. As a result,
books were downplayed and projects centering on vocational training
become the mainstay of many public schools.
While Dewey saw the value of maintaining some of the traditional
academic content, some of his disciples worked to have it removed
completely. William Heard Kilpatrick took the mantle of leadership for
the progressive education movement from Dewey as an immensely popular
professor at Teachers College. His 1925 book Foundations of Method
described an educational philosophy that, to this day, still controls
much of American education. It argued that we should simply teach
children—to be child–centered, not subject–centered—because knowledge is
changing so quickly and today’s subjects will be of no use tomorrow. It
celebrated whole–language over phonics and critical thinking over rote
learning, tests, and even report cards. His first opportunity to design
an experimental class resulted in no set curriculum, no assigned
reading, math or spelling work, and no tests.
Augustine and the Academic Tradition
For the last hundred years, the progressive education movement has
promoted a child–centered curriculum as a necessary remedy against a
dying books–and–content–centered form of schooling. This old order was
often referred to as a “liberal education” or possibly the “academic
tradition.” Which worldview undergirds this academic tradition in
schooling?
Progressives and traditionalists have very different views of human
nature. Rousseau and the progressives argue that humans are created
happy, free, and good while traditionalists see things more like the
fourth century Christian Augustine of Hippo. Augustine believed that all
humans are born with a sin nature and a tendency to do evil. There is a
famous passage in his Confessions in which he describes an
incident in his youth where he and his friends stole and destroyed fruit
from a nearby orchard because, as he writes, “I became evil for no
reason. The only motive I had for this wickedness was the wickedness
itself. It was disgusting, but I loved it.”{7}
Augustine believed that wisdom did not come from within our fallen
natures, but came from God and knowledge of his word. He argued that “we
should be led by the fear of God to seek the knowledge of His will . . .
it is necessary to have our hearts subdued by piety, and not run in the
face of Holy Scripture.”{8}
While Augustine depended on God as a source for wisdom, he acknowledged
that teachers need to use good methods if they are going to shape the
minds and hearts of their students. He asked the rhetorical question,
Should the wicked “tell their falsehoods briefly, clearly and plausibly,
while the latter [believers] tell the truth in such a way that it is
tedious to listen to, hard to understand, and . . . not easy to believe
it?”{9}
Augustine and those who followed in his tradition down though the
centuries believed that children must be trained in the beliefs and
disciplines that made for a civilized society. Not just any information
or content would do. A truly educated person would receive a foundation
of theological training that would inform all the other disciplines. The
first universities in the eleventh and twelfth centuries continued to
see theology as the queen of the sciences. Although theology was still
center stage through the Renaissance and the Reformation, it was removed
from its throne during the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.
The progressive education movement’s efforts to reduce the influence
of Christianity on schooling in America have been successful. During the
1960s and 70s the Supreme Court issued ruling after ruling that
resulted in the secularization of our public schools. Parents would have
to look elsewhere to have their children instructed in a Christian
environment.
Why Does This Matter?
Even the progressive education leader John Dewey understood the need
to transmit the best of one’s culture to the next generation through the
process of education. He wrote, “Unless pains are taken to see that
genuine and thorough transmission takes place, the most civilized group
will relapse into barbarism and then into savagery.”{10} Dewey and his disciples planned to use this transmission process to change our culture dramatically.
Dewey’s goal was to change the worldview upon which educational
philosophy in America was grounded. He was convinced that the only
intellectually responsible philosophy was a naturalistic one. This meant
that education, ethics, politics, and life itself should be devoid of
any hope in, or influence from, supernatural beliefs. As a result, he
worked to replace America’s faith in Christianity with faith in
democracy, which he referred to as a religious belief. Revelation and
religious authority would be replaced with the scientific method and
this new faith in democracy.
Dewey was instrumental in breaking the connection to our past as a
society. His followers took his lead, offering an even more radical
break from the academic tradition. For instance William Heard
Kilpatrick, a mathematician, argued that mathematics is “harmful” for
ordinary living, and that dancing, dramatics, and doll playing offered
more potential for educational growth.{11}
At the end of WWII, progressive ideology reigned supreme in American
education. But even though the battle over educational philosophy had
been won, its implementation would constantly be challenged. The Russian
satellite Sputnik in the 1950s caused a temporary panic and a short
lived re–emphasis on science and mathematics. But by then, the
enrollment in science had already declined precipitously. For instance,
fewer than five percent of high school students took physics in 1955,
down from nearly twenty percent in 1900.{12}
By the late sixties, only the lucky few who scored well on IQ tests
received an academic high school curriculum, and our universities had
begun to give in to student demands for relevancy by gutting the
required curriculum and adding less challenging, highly politicized
programs like women’s studies, Black studies, and peace studies. To
some, it appeared as if adult supervision had disappeared from our
university campuses.
In recent decades, parents have resorted to homeschooling and private
schools in search of rigorous academics for their children. Others have
pushed for charter schools and voucher programs to re–inject greater
rigor in the public schools. But it appears that the hundred years war
over educational philosophy will continue well into the future.
Notes
1. U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis,
www.bea.gov.
2. NAEP Data Explorer, National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Eduation Institute of Education Sciences,
nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/naepdata.
3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. Alan Bloom (Basic Books, 1979), 278.
4. Ibid., 281.
5. Ibid., 84.
6. Ibid., 116.
7. Augustine,
Confessions 2.4.9.
8. D. Bruce Lockerbie,
A Passion For Learning (Moody Press, 1994), 78.
9. Ibid., 80.
10. E. D. Hirsch,
The Schools We Need, 120.
11. Diane Ravitch,
Left Back (Simon & Schuster, 2000), 181.
12. Ibid., 350.
