This lecture has been delivered at Hillsdale College Summer Hostel programs. It is the first of two lectures on American education; the second is on the educational ideas of the Progressive movement.

 

In order to conduct politics according to a written constitution, it is helpful to have a citizenry that can read. And if they can read a logical syllogism like the Declaration of Independence with understanding, so much the better.

American citizens of the founding generation found themselves in the midst of the Second Great Awakening, the movement that gave us, among other things, the institution of the Sunday school. Many Americans of that generation learned to read in Sunday school. By 1790, almost every male American citizen in New England could read and write, and the vast majority of women could, as well. New Englanders were the most literate population in the world at that time. The literacy rates declines as one headed further south, but estimates are that even in the states with the lowest literacy rates, seventy to seventy-five percent of male citizens could read and write.

This doesn’t mean that the American Founders were satisfied with our schools. The great political revolution or regime which they had undertaken required a new kind of education. One of the most famous founding-generation Americans, Noah Webster—of dictionary fame—complained that American schools lacked what he called “proper books.” There was no shortage of books as such. In fact, schoolboys memorized Demosthenes and Cicero and even debates in the British Parliament, which Webster judged to be “excellent specimens of good sense, polished style and perfect oratory.” But there were two problems: products of “foreign and ancient nations,” these speeches were “not very interesting to children.” What is more, “they cannot be very useful” to American children, who are not Brits, anymore. “Every child in America should be acquainted with his own country;” “know “the history of his own country”; “lisp the praise of liberty”; and learn about “those illustrious heroes and statesmen, who have wrought a revolution in her favor.” The “principal” American textbook, then, should consist of a essays “respecting the settlement and geography of America; the history of the late revolution [Webster was writing in 1788], and of the most remarkable characters and events that distinguished it, and a compendium of the principles of the federal and provincial governments.” “These are interesting objects to every man; they call home the minds of youth and fix them upon the interests of their own country, and they assist in forming attachments to it, as well as in enlarging the understanding.” Webster saw that a child can learn to read by reading about American things; that by calling the children’s minds home to their own town, state, and country citizens will result, men and women ready to think and speak together about governing themselves.

Far from rejecting the wisdom of foreigners—wisdom, after all, is wisdom wherever it comes from—Webster cites “the great Montesquieu,” who teaches “that the laws of education ought to be relative to the principles of the government. In despotic governments, the people should have little or no education, except what tends to inspire them with a servile fear,” because “information is fatal to despotism.” In monarchies—what we would call constitutional or limited monarchies—education should differ depending on which class of citizen the student comes from. In such political communities, each citizen should not only ‘know his place’ but know the things appropriate to that place. There is no point in teaching rhetoric to a shoemaker if the shoemaker lives in a monarchic regime, and so will have no place to exercise his oratorical skills beyond the local tavern. Which could only lead to trouble.

But, Webster continues, now quoting Montesquieu directly, “in a republican government the whole power of education is required.” “Here,” Webster observes, “every class of people should know and love the laws. This knowledge should be diffused by means of schools and newspapers; and an attachment to the laws may be formed by early impressions upon the mind.” Some fifty years later, a young Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln would say almost exactly the same thing in his now-famous Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois.

Webster even insists that “a system of education as gives every citizens an opportunity of acquiring knowledge and fitting himself for places of trust” is one of the two “fundamental articles” of republican regimes; the other is equal opportunity to “acquir[e] what his industry merits”—an opportunity granted when the aristocratic systems of primogeniture and land monopoly are abolished, as indeed they are in the Constitution and the Northwest Ordinance. Education and economic liberty together “are the fundamental articles; the sine qua non of the existence of the American republics.” It would be, he writes, an act of “absurdity” for Americans to copy “the manners and adopt the institutions of Monarchies.”

Although several states, including Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia, have provided for colleges and academies “where people of property may educate their sons,” they have made “no provision… for instructing the poorer rank of people, even in reading and writing.” Thus, while their “constitutions are republican,” their “laws of education are monarchical.” Webster therefore advocates the establishment of public schools.

What is more, “When I speak of a diffusion of Knowledge, I do not mean merely a knowledge of spelling books, and the New Testament. An acquaintance with ethics, and with general principles of law, commerce, money and government, is necessary for the yeomanry of a republican state.” Indeed, “the more generally knowledge is diffused among the substantial yeomanry, the more perfect will be the laws of a republican state” because the citizens will be able to choose good representatives an also take on governing responsibilities themselves, in turn.

With respect to ethics, “The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.” He concludes:

Until such a system shall be adopted and pursued, until the Statesman and Divine shall unite their efforts in forming the human mind, rather than lopping [off] its excrescences, after it has been neglected; until Legislators discover that the only way to make good citizens and subjects, is to nourish them from infancy; and until parents shall be convinced that the worst of men are not the proper teachers to make the best; mankind cannot know to what a degree of perfection society and government may be carried. American affords the fairest opportunities for making the experiment, and opens the most encouraging prospect of success.

Along with the other prominent members of the founding generation who wrote on education, Webster saw a firm connection between political self-government, republicanism, and the need for moral self-government and certain kinds of learning. These included the intellectual fundamentals, of course, along with the moral fundamentals seen in the New Testament. But they also included the economic and political fundamentals, “the general principles of law, commerce, money, and government.” Glancing at Americans right now, one may be pardoned for thinking that we would be better off if every public school student learned such “general principles” of self-government.

More politically prominent Americans than Webster wrote extensively about education in America. I will discuss three of them: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. But behind them all we see the educational advice of the English philosopher, John Locke, who of course had such a decisive influence on the argument they made in the Declaration of Independence, which those three men drafted. So I shall begin with a brief look at Locke’s seminal book, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, published in numerous editions beginning in 1693 and carefully revised several times by Locke.

The first thing to notice about Locke’s book is its intended audience. Locke does not address the upper aristocracy; on the contrary, he ridicules such men as frivolous and rather useless. The aristocrat, “always with his cup at his nose”—one that often contains liquids stronger than chocolate, coffee, or tea—cannot be depended upon to take intelligent charge of his son’s education. Locke instead addresses the father of “the Young Gentleman,” meaning the gentry class or lower portion of the landed aristocracy. It is in them that Locke sees the kingdom’s continued and future greatness because they show the traits of rationality and industry that the pampered and idle lords and ladies will seldom if ever display. As it happened, one of the key features of Great Britain’s rise to dominance of the seas and of commerce, and not incidentally of its successful transition from monarchism to republicanism in the centuries following Locke, would be the way in which the gentry class made its transition from the mores of feudal, warrior aristocrats to those of what one nineteenth-century writer would call “captains of industry.”

Locke was a home-schooler; his gentry could afford to be. But he also dislikes the boys’ schools: “Children who live together strive for Mastery.” The constant supervision by and contact with adults is far better. The two teachers of the Young Gentleman will be his father and the tutor his father hires. Although Locke doesn’t yield an inch to even the most Calvinist divines in taking a jaundiced view of the nature of children—he says that they love liberty but love “Power and Dominion” even more—he denies the tutor any power to punish them corporally. Even the father should strictly bridle his onw anger while punishing the boy, interspersing calm admonitions between the spanks. Locke recommends this course because he regards the authority of example as more powerful than either coercion or mere precept. The boy will resent being ruled by force and, much worse, eventually may emulate such rule, developing habits of tyrannizing, to which his own nature makes him all too susceptible.

And even such firmness as Locke does recommend ought to be relaxed as soon as possible. The father should ask his son’s advice on appropriate subjects, especially those concerning the management of the estate. Listen to the boy’s idea, and when he comes up with a good one, pretend it’s his very own, and follow it. Such a mild form of freedom actually increases the father’s authority by adding to his son’s esteem for him. This quickens the child’s maturation, substituting serious considerations for childish concerns: “The sooner you treat him as a Man, the sooner he will be one.”

Locke decries the old scholastic education—animated by the Christian Aristotelianism fashionable in most of the schools of his time—but also rejects the abstract and indeed mathematical education that one might derive from the example of that decided anti-Scholastic, René Descartes. Locke wants above all a useful education, intended to prepare the Young Gentleman “to judge right of Men, and manage his Affairs with them.” With them, not over them. He wants to inculcate “the knowledge of a Man of Business, a Carriage suitable to his Rank, and to be Eminent and Useful in his Country according to his Station.” Not so much the aristocrat’s warlike or battlefield courage but courage in the sense of “the quiet Possession of a Man’s self, and an undisturb’d doing his Duty, whatever Evil besets, or Danger lies in his way” is the Lockean way. Locke readies his country for the courage of the stiff upper lip, soon regarded as a national character trait.

Accordingly, Locke discourages influences that appeal to the imagination—whether imagined fear, which will effeminate the mind, or imagined glories, which will harden it against reason. Poetry, painting—anything that engages the passions by making them seem noble–are to be firmly discouraged. If a child has what Locke calls “a Poetick Vein, ’tis to me the strangest thing in the World , that the Father should desire, or suffer it to be cherished, or improved. Methinks the parents should labor to have it stifled, and suppressed, as much as may be…. There are very few instances of those, who have added to their Patrimony by any thing that they have reaped” from the Mounts of Parnassus.”

In the commercial-republican regime of America, Locke’s emphasis on education for one’s social “station”—what Montesquieu would call a “monarchic” bias—hardly got much play, except in some parts of the South, where a gentry class had established itself during colonial times. As did Webster, Americans generally wanted schools for large numbers of citizens, not only for the few. But Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson all share Locke’s esteem for usefulness, for the practical virtues of citizenship and commerce.

In proposing a college for Pennsylvania in 1749, Benjamin Franklin cited “the great Mr. Locke” and his “much esteemed” treatise on education. Nor is this idle praise; in his extensive footnotes to the proposal, Franklin quotes Locke far more extensively than any other writer. Following Locke’s lead, Franklin emphasized the need for a “more useful Culture of young Minds” than that seen (for example) in the aristocratic pastime of gardening. Along with the obvious curricular choices—mathematics, English, geography, morality—Franklin insists on the study of history broadly understood. Not only will reading histories teach political oratory, but it will also teach “the necessity of a Publick Religion”—specifically, Christianity—and the “advantages” of constitutions. Franklin wanted to prepare American students for thinking about constitutions some quarter-century before he signed the Declaration of Independence, and nearly forty years before he sat in the Philadelphia Convention. The study of history can also lead to discussions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, which in turn lead to debate and therefore to reasoning. Finally, “natural history” and the “history of commerce” can complement one another, if the study of nature leads to improved techniques of agriculture. Tellingly, Franklin includes no separate study of theology, contenting himself with saying in a footnote, “To have in View the Glory and Service of God, as some express themselves, is only the same Thing in other Words” for “Doing Good to Men,” thereby “imitat[ing] His Beneficence.”

Notice that Franklin does not follow Locke in insisting on private tutoring. He is proposing a college. “Youth will come out of this School fitted for learning any Business, Calling or Profession, except such wherein Languages are required [theology, for example]; and tho’ unacquainted with any ancient or foreign tongue, they will be Masters of their own, which is of more immediate and general Use.” Time Europeans spend learning foreign languages will thereby accrue to “such a Foundation of Knowledge and Ability, as, properly improved, may qualify them to pass thro’ and execute the several offices of civil Life, with Advantage and Reputation to themselves and Country.”

After the independence and republican regime change Franklin had long prepared was realized, he took a particular interest in the schooling of freed slaves. As early as 1763, on a visit to a Sunday school for black children, he concluded that “their Apprehension seems as quick, their Memory as strong, and their Docility in every Respect equal to that of white Children. You will wonder perhaps that I should ever doubt it, and I will not undertake to justify all my Prejudices, nor to account for them.” In a public address in 1789, Franklin called for a “national policy” of slave emancipation. “Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils.” The “galling chains, that bond his body, do also fetter his intellectual faculties, and impair the social affections of his heart” because he who is treated like “a mere machine” finds his reason “suspended” and his conscience stifled, having been “chiefly governed by the passion of fear.” Recall that this is precisely the thing Locke wanted to avoid when criticizing the use of corporal punishment—the very punishment that a slave finds himself subjected to not only in childhood but throughout his life. “Under such circumstances, freedom may often prove a misfortune to himself, and prejudicial to society.” Corporal punishment instills fear, and fear, Montesquieu teaches, animates despotism.

Therefore, “Attention to emancipated black people, it is… to be hoped, will become a branch of our national policy,” “a serious duty incumbent upon us.” “to instruct to advise, to qualify those, who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty, to promote in them habits of industry, to furnish them with employments suited to their age, sex, talents, and other circumstances, and to procure their children an education calculated for their future situation in life; these are the great outlines of the plan which we have adopted, and which we conceive will essentially promote the public good, and the happiness of these our hitherto too much neglected fellow-creatures.” As with whites, the education of black students will be preeminently useful, with an insistence on “a deep impression of the most important and generally acknowledged moral and religious principles.” Franklin proposes a “Committee of Guardians” which would place the students in apprenticeships. Like Locke, Franklin wants useful citizens, but unlike Locke he wants them on American, republican terms—without the rigid class distinctions that Locke needed to work with (and to some extent around and against) in England.

John Adams shared Franklin’s well-known esteem for modern science: “Man,” he wrote, “by the Exercise of his Reason can invent Engines and Instruments, to take advantage of the Powers of Nature, and accomplish the most astonishing Designs.” He also saw that this conquest of nature promised both great good and evil. Education for boys and girls alike must therefore include education in philanthropy, patriotism, and “the art of self-government, without which they never can act as a wise part in the government of societies, great or small.” “The study and practice of the exalted virtues of the Christian system… will happily tend to subdue the turbulent passions of men.”

Although necessary, such study and practice will not only suffice. “There is no simple connection between knowledge and virtue,” Adams observed, and that goes for the knowledge of Christian virtue as well as the knowledge of modern science. This is true partly because social elites often devise means to “keep the people in ignorance, and… to conceal truth and propagate falsehood,” sometimes in the name of high moral principles. Educators may deceive, even as they claim to educate.

These reservations notwithstanding, Adams thought that much more might be done toward improving the character of the American people through education. Education is “more indispensable, and must be more general, under a free government than any other,” inasmuch as the governing element in any regime must be educated, and in the American regime the people are sovereign. Education must therefore be redefined in terms of self-government: “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it.” School districts no larger than one square mile must be maintained at public expense. In each school (and here Adams departs from Webster) the children must not be taught to “adore their generals, admirals, bishops, and statesmen.” Don’t adore Washington but “the nation which educated him.” Why? Recalling a lesson of ancient Greek history, Adams remarks, “If Thebes owes its liberty and glory to Epaminondas, she will lose both when he dies. But if the knowledge, the principles, the virtues, and the capacities of the Theban nation produced an Epaminondas, her liberties will remain when he is no more.”

Adams’s educational system would have been locally governed, but it would include one national institution. Republics cultivate eloquence. Inasmuch as “it is not to be disputed that the form of government has an influence upon language, and language in its turn influences not only the form of government, but the temper, the sentiments, and manners of the people,” Congress should frame a national academy, modeled on those in France, Spain, and Italy, for “correcting, improving, and ascertaining the English language.” In this century, Adams observed, French has succeeded Latin as the main language of Europe; yet it has not been universally established and “it is not probable that will” be. “English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French in the present age,” thanks to “the increasing population of America” and “the influence of England in the world.” An American Academy would help to ensure that the coming empire of English—we would call it a cultural empire—will speak well, in order to govern itself well. Speaking well, with precision and vigor, itself exemplifies self-government.

Finally, no consideration of the educational ideas of the American Founders would be complete without considering the Sage of Monticello. Thomas Jefferson endorsed the Enlightenment project of “diffusion of knowledge among the people,” which he called “the sure foundation” of liberty and happiness. He considered prerevolutionary France an object lesson of how a benevolent and amiable people “surrounded by so many blessings from nature, are yet loaded with misery by kings, nobles, and priests,” who kept them in subjection by keeping them in ignorance.

Civic education serves as both gateway to and guardian of all other kinds. Ordinary citizens and those best endowed by nature to govern ordinary citizens as their representatives should partake of it. Political history will show the people, “possessed… of the experience of other ages and countries,” to “know ambition under all its shapes,” and so be “prompt[ed] to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.” Beyond civic education, a liberal education will render the best-endowed citizens “worthy to receive, and also to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.”

Specifically, in Virginia Jefferson advocated the establishment of public school districts “wherein the great mass of the people will receive their instruction” in Greek, Roman, modern European, and American history and in “the first elements of morality,” which consist of instruction in “how to work out their own greatest happiness, by showing them that it does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed them, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.”

There is a link between these two tracks of instruction, between history and morality. The link is experience. Historical study provides students with a far wider range of experience than they could ever attain if students were “confined to real life.” The better students, and also the wealthier ones, will go on to instruction in Greek and Latin; “I do not pretend that language is science,” but it is “the instrument for the attainment of science,” and in Jefferson’s day scientists conducted much of their business in Greek and Latin. From this system, “twenty o the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually,” statewide, and “half of these will be sent to William and Mary College to be liberally educated.” A liberal education as the culmination of an education for self-government should not be confused with dilettantism, the product of “self-learning and self-sufficiency.” Such autodidacticism leads men “possessing Latin and sometimes Greek, a knowledge of the globes, and the first six books of Euclid, to imagine and communicate this as the sum of science,” sending graduates into the world “with just taste enough of learning to be alienated from industrious pursuits and not enough to do service in the ranks of science”. No more than Locke and Franklin does Jefferson intend education to disable citizens from usefulness, even if the public education he has in mind is broader than theirs.

Jefferson advocated not the founding of a national academy but a national university. Although the “ordinary branches” of education are not to be removed from “the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better all the concerns to which it is equal,” the most advanced sciences need public support. While this did not occur, Jefferson’s final project, the founding of the University of Virginia, was designed to accomplish the same end on the state level. Although public, the university as Jefferson envisioned it was to be very compactly organized, with a minimum of bureaucracy. There were to be no divisions among the students—no ‘freshmen’ or ‘seniors’—and the courses of study were to be entirely elective. That is, Jefferson’s university was to maximize both equality and liberty. Self-government at the University of Virginia would have needed few or no administrators, only teachers and students learning together. Architecturally, Jefferson designed the campus to resemble a village, very much the educational equivalent of the Jeffersonian ‘ward republic.’

When considering the plans of all these writers, their shades of difference notwithstanding, we are left with a sense of the way in which they conceived the purposes of education, the ways of educating, the subjects taught as congruent with the regime they were intent on establishing: a democratic and commercial republic designed to secure the unalienable rights of Americans. When the American Progressives planned an educational system fit for their new republic, they thought no less coherently.

This lecture is the second Hillsdale College Summer Hostel Program lecture on the principles underlying American education.

 

On July 4, 2014, The New York Times published a new Declaration of Independence. You may have missed it. Written by Jennifer Barnett, who is described as “Teacher Leader in Residence for the Center for Teaching Quality” in North Carolina, the “Declaration for Teachers” mimics some of Thomas Jefferson’s language—although unlike Jefferson’s declaration, which is a logical syllogism, this one consists merely of a series of assertions. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” she bravely begins, “that all teachers are valuable, and that are endowed by their skill and expertise with a certain unalienable right to lead.” What is more, “Educational systems must be designed to serve students, deriving their power from the consent of teachers. Whenever any school or system forgets its way, it is the right of the teachers to alter or abolish it.”

Now, you may have assumed that local citizens governed public schools, that consent for the establishment and maintenance of your schools came from such practices as school board elections and budget referendums. Well, silly you. “No longer will teachers allow what seems to be in direct object”—I think she means “opposition,” but vocabulary may not be her strongest suit—”to their service dictate what is best for students or their profession.” What we need, rather, are “teacher-powered schools” in which “teacher leadership” is, because it “ought to be,” “the foundations upon which education lies.”

The Center for Teaching Quality receives part of its funding from—you guessed it—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So we know where their money comes from. But you may be asking, ‘Where do such astonishing notions as these come from?’ The answer in this case, and in almost all cases in American public education for the past hundred years, is the Gospel According to John—John Dewey, that is. The religious language is apt because in 1897 Dewey titled one of his most influential essays, “My Pedagogic Creed.” There he wrote, “The teacher is engaged, not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life. I believe that every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling; that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of right social growth. I believe that in this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God.”

A teacher-leader, indeed: “education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform,” “the only sure method of social reconstruction.” The true kingdom of God means just such a reconstructed human society, which means that the true God, according to the apostle of “My Pedagogic Creed,” is none other than humanity—as one would expect from a co-signer of the original, 1933, version of “The Humanist Manifesto.” Previously, the word ‘humanism’ had meant the practice of the humanities; a humanist was one who studied and taught literature, philosophy and the other liberal arts. The liberal arts composed the heart of the curriculum of the old universities, founded under the aegis of, first, the Catholic Church and then the Protestant churches. But the new humanism rejected the religious framework of the old liberal arts and took upon itself the model of social science, modeled on the applied mathematics of engineering and also on the scientific method of experimentation–in this case, social experimentation.

If Ms. Barnett received her ideas indirectly from John Dewey, where did Dewey get them? Born in Vermont in 1859, Dewey received his Ph. D from the Johns Hopkins University—as did the other of the two most important first-generation American Progressives, Woodrow Wilson. Johns Hopkins was the first American university animated by the principles of German philosophy and modeled upon the German notion of the research university. German philosophy in America derived from the thought of the nineteenth-century philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel put moral and political philosophy on an entirely new foundation, a foundation opposed to the philosophic foundation of the American founding, which combined ideas derived from the classic liberal education with strong elements of the modern, scientific education proposed by Francis Bacon and others.

As you know, the American Founders looked to the laws of nature and of nature’s God as the basis of moral and political right. All men are created equal, not in intelligence, character, or physical appearance but in their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. those unalienable rights—as distinguished from the supposedly unalienable right of teacher-leaders to run our schools—are what governments are intended to secure. The United States Constitution constitutes the American federal government and serves as the supreme human law of the land, under the laws of nature and of nature’s God.

Hegel took morality and politics—including political economy—in a decidedly new direction. Hegel regarded both natural right and the God of the Bible as myths. These myths served humanity ‘back in their day’—Hegel regarded the teachings of the Bible as superior to the paganisms they replaced—but ‘that was then and this is now.’ We’ve outgrown such things.

What is real, not mythological, is history—history defined as the evolution of all matter and all energy toward their apex, toward their end, toward their purpose—namely, the thoroughgoing domination o the human mind over all of nature. The laws of nature and of nature’s God are no longer the standard because we can now conquer nature. Politically and economically, this will mean a worldwide human society or world state. The role of education and of educator in this scheme is to serve each national state by leading each nation toward this new version of the KIngdom of God. Thus the new, scientistic ‘humanism’ will serve a new liberalism—a liberalism defined not in terms of individual liberty or popular self-government but in terms of the liberation of all humanity from the shackles of nature and of the old religions in a fully rational world-state governed by bureaucracies staffed by university-educated experts in scientific administration.

In America, Hegel’s ideas became prominent in the middle of the nineteenth century, seen in the school of thought known as the Saint Louis Hegelians. Just as subsequent thinkers took the basic structure of Hegelian thought (specifically its claim that moral and political right derives from the dialectical clash of opposing forces in the course of human events) in a variety of directions—from Marxism on the ‘Left’ to race theory on the ‘Right’—the Saint Louis Hegelians divided into a left wing and a right wing. The right wing became known as Social Darwinists. The left wing eventually became the American Progressives.

The most prominent of the Social-Darwinist Hegelians was William Torrey Harris who served as President Grant’s Education Commissioner in the 1870s. Among the most prominent on the left wing of Saint Hegelianism was George Sylvester Morris. Morris Taught at Johns Hopkins in the early 1880s, when Dewey and Wilson were graduate students. Both men went on to careers in education: Wilson eventually becoming the president of Princeton, Dewey going first to the University of Michigan, where Morris had arranged for his appointment, then to the University of Chicago—another German-style research university—and then and most strategically to Columbia University, and particularly at its famous Teacher’s College—for decades the most prestigious college for professional educators in the United States.

For Dewey, for Wilson, and for the American Progressives generally, the American founding—based upon the old philosophy of liberty, the old liberalism of natural right—was good for its time but now obsolete. A new liberalism was needed, one based on historical right or progress and not the unalienable, natural rights of the old Declaration of Independence that the old Constitution was designed to secure. The new, “elastic,” “organic,” or “living” Constitution would systematically grow the central state, keeping pace with the growth of the size and complexity of American society and, not incidentally, providing employment for university-trained, tenured administrators and public-school teachers. Thus the liberal education that formed the minds of the American Founders was also obsolete, to be replaced by a new liberal education for the new liberalism or administrative statism. In the first years of the twentieth century the professional classes would form the core of the Progressie movement in all its political campaigns. Whereas Marxism, a form of historical-dialectical materialism sought assumed that revolution would come at the hands of the factory workers, Progressivism, which retained more of the historical-dialectical idealism of the Hegelian wellspring of historicism assumed that revolution could be peaceful, well-managed by the professional classes, practitioners of planning not of physical labor.

Dewey attempted to combine the idealist and materialist dimensions of historicism, usually to the advantage of materialism. Philosophy, which had once attempted to understand human nature as something fixed and imperfect, must now dedicate itself to social, economic, and political progress aimed at perfecting human beings. Dewey shares with Marx the rejection of natural right and an esteem for social egalitarianism. He also shares with Marx and evolutionary form of materialism. But he sharply disagrees with Marx, and thus opposed Soviet Communism, on two crucial matters: the regime of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the use of class warfare as the means of social progress. According to the more peaceful gospel of John Dewey, education via the scientific method is the true vehicle of social change and such education should serve not a ‘top-down’ regime of dictatorship but a civil, republican regime of social experimentation and pluralism. The dialectic remains, but it is the dialectic modeled on the laboratory not on the clashes of crowds in the street. It is a dialectic for which urban professionals find themselves well-suited and, in the Deweyan classroom well-trained.

With Dewey, the school is now reconceived as the laboratory of social progress. Children must not compete against one another in school. They should learn by cooperating with one another in group projects. “I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the [human] race,” Dewey wrote in My Pedagogic Creed. Such participation begins not with intellectual training—learning our ABCs—but with what we now call ‘hands-on’ projects: cooking, sewing, manual training of various sorts. Dewey aims at fusing the mentality of the working class with the mentality of the intellectual class, all in the service of forming one all-encompassing class of citizens who are socially equal, not equal merely in terms of their natural, unalienable rights. The state, as Dewey conceived it, following Hegel, is an organic unity, an organism, which harmonizes the relations of all social associations with it, including the careful regulation of business. The school is the brain of the social organism that is the state. The teacher thus does indeed become the true leader of human society, along with other professional public administrators who form part of the modern state’s nervous system or bureaucracy.

To give you an idea of how far Dewey ‘socialized’ human life—because this went far beyond mere socialism in economics or democracy in politics—I point to his theory of how children learn. When he says that “all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race,” he gives as his example the human infant. It is (he alleges) “through the response which is made to the child’s instinctive babblings [that] the child comes to know what the babblings mean.” My own impression is that children already know exactly what their instinctive babblings mean. It is rather for the parents to figure out what the child is babbling about, and then to decide whether the child should get what he wants. It is further for the child then to understand the language in which the parents command, cajole, and teach him. After understanding that language (including the words that form sentences like “No!” and, after some schooling, “All men are created equal”), the child can then move on to live a meaningful life in the service of the God who created the terms and conditions of life including the nature governed by His laws. That is the kind of primary education which culminated in the old liberal education seen in the old colleges and universities of Europe and America, the education that modern philosophy pushed toward experimental science without ever entirely jettisoning the old humanism. That education had formed and informed the old liberalism—the liberalism of self-government, of individual and citizen liberty founded upon equality of natural rights.

Dewey directs his attention principally at elementary education. For a consideration of university education under the aegis of Progressivism, we turn to Woodrow Wilson. Wilson also exemplifies an important dimension of the original Progressivism not seen in Dewey: a serious Christian element. Although the universities of our own time have abandoned Christianity, they had not and could not have done so in Wilson’s time. More broadly, down through the civil rights movement of the Martin Luther King era, the new liberalism had a serious Christian dimension.

The Christian element of Progressivism correlates strongly with the non-bureaucratic, non-technical side of Progressivism—the figure of the opinion leader. Son of a Presbyterian minister, Wilson was trained in public speaking from childhood. He knew that most of his fellow citizens were not, but he also knew that they grew up listening to sermons and political orations. “We shall always be ruled by orators so long as we attempt self-government,” government by persuasion and consent. Because a large nation cannot rule itself directly, but needs to elect representatives, citizens must learn to make speeches, or at least to listen discerningly to them. “Literate citizens, fitted to form judgments in affairs, to vote, to choose from among their neighbors those who shall be fit for government,” should be the products of the public school. To ensure the verbal abilities and the knowledge of the trajectory of history a self-governing people must have, universal public education is indispensable; “it is the height of unwisdom to leave it to chance or to charity.”

Wilson had no misty, idealized view of this process or its purposes. Along with religion, “education is one of the highest and most effective police agencies,” preventing the idleness that is “the mother of a great host of the lesser crimes from which communities suffer.” For example, elementary schooling will help to solve the race problem of the South, a problem Wilson attributes to whites’ reluctance to share government with “an ignorant and inferior race,” currently “unfit for self-government.” “For their elevation [Southern blacks] need liberal and powerful aid and systematic encouragement,” including compulsory education, which may in time transform them into “an exceedingly valuable, because steady and hardy, peasantry.” Wilson hold out no higher hopes for black uplift than that.  Given the Progressives’ adherence to ‘race science’—cutting-edge science at the time—Wilson held less sensible opinions on the prospects for the education of black Americans than Benjamin Franklin had done. Public schooling will also prevent the continued spread of Roman Catholicism, whose Church hierarchy “adheres with desperate determination to the purpose of absolutely controlling the education of the youth of its communion.” Because “they who control the education of the youth of any community control the social and political destiny of that community,” public schooling alone can assure provision for a nonsectarian education that puts arithmetic and geometry ahead of catechism.

It was when he considered higher education that Wilson rose above the level of these banalities. As president of Princeton University, Wilson helped to invent the liberal arts college of the twentieth century. In his conception, renewed colleges and universities would supply the leaders of the citizens formed by the public schools, “a few chosen, however, not by birth, but by ambition, by opportunity, by the compulsion of gifts of initiative, by the dictates of that higher sort of necessity which puts social compulsion upon men to stand at the front offer themselves as guides”—as men who are “experts in the relations of things.”

Experts in the relations of things are not the same as experts in things, masters of minutiae, fit staffers within the administrative state or the corporate bureaucracies. “Government is as important as industry—not only the thing we formally call government, but also the government of right thinking, of clear thoughtful planning of minds trained to see things in wholes and combinations, divorced from special interests and released upon the general field of thought and observation.” Without hereditary leaders, democracies need a real elite, one schooled in the “new universe of knowledge” beyond “the old discipline of Greek, Latin, Mathematics, and English.” Scientific knowledge must be added, and (note the Hegelian language) as “the final synthesis of learning,” philosophy. But learning along will not suffice. “Not many pupils of a College are to be investigators: they are to be citizens and the world’s servants in every field of practical endeavor.” “No longer stand[ing] aloof from the natural world,” the university cannot afford, by means of an exclusive emphasis on science, to inculcate agnosticism in philosophy and anarchism in politics. “The spirit of morality was changed and established once and for all by the coming of Christ into the world”; Princeton and other private colleges and universities must foster that spirit. Wilson goes so far as to claim that “scholarship has never, so far as I can at this moment recollect, been associated with any religion except the religion of Jesus Christ.” Leaving aside the likely objections of Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Confucians and others to that claim, the key thing to notice is that Wilson combines the notion of philosophic synthesis, expertise in the relations of things, deriving from Hegel, with (Protestant) Christian morality.

Christian education of leaders would proceed indirectly. “Character cannot be deliberately produced. Anybody who goes to work to produce a good character in himself will produce nothing but a prig.” Character develops only through a structure of duties. Since “no one has ever dreamed of” imparting erudition to undergraduates—the time being too short—college should teach “mental discipline.” Because “some things discipline the mind, and some do not,” all subjects cannot be equal. Wilson rejected the Harvard system of free electives enacted by its president, Charles Norton Eliot, as “a confusing variety of studies, a bill of fare which [the student] could not possibly eat through with digestion”—a criticism that would presumably apply to Jefferson’s University of Virginia, as well. Professors know better than undergraduates the courses of study that will discipline the mind. an older student may elect a course of studies among various curricula, but foundational studies of pure (not applied science, philosophy, and literature must be finished first.

Beyond curricular structure, Wilson sought to structure Princeton itself as “a self-governing community, fundamentally democratic in its constitution,” so that graduates will not leave as “the innocent youngsters and easily gulled tyros” they may have been upon arrival. To speed this maturation, Wilson introduced the precept system, modeled on the English universities whereby students are tutored individually or in small groups by senior scholars. A real community cannot have faculty and students living dual-track lives, with the teacher not knowing “what the undergraduate is thinking about or what models he is forming his life upon,” and with the undergraduate “not knowing how human a fellow the teacher is” and “how many interesting things both his life and his studies illustrate and make attractive.” The preceptor functions as “guide, philosopher, and friend” assigned to the student upon declaring a major, selecting the books they will read together. The Christian Progressive preceptor leads privately, as the Christian Progressive statesman does publicly.

Wilson also intended to restructure the physical layout of Princeton in order to reinforce the more intimate community he planned. He wanted the new graduate school to be moved to the middle of the campus, so that the graduate students and undergraduates would talk with one another. This would bring those engaged in pre-professional training, the experts of the near future, into regular and friendly contact with the leading citizens of the near future. Wilson also envisioned the English “quad” system of arranging the buildings, with dormitories facing one another across small courtyards not unlike town squares—again, for ease of striking up acquaintances and talking. The academic equivalent of Jefferson’s ward republic hereby enters the service of education for leadership of and in the administrative state.

Finally and most ambitiously, Wilson tried to break up the eating clubs that dominated many Princeton students’ social lives. The clubs operated rather like tonier versions of fraternizes; Wilson complained that they were “splitting classes into faction, and endangering that class spirit upon which we depend for our self-government and for the transmission of most of the loyal impulses of the University.” Christian Hegelianism demands synthesis, organic union not faction, centralization. Quad Associations would replace these clubs, Wilson hoped, eliminating their self-selecting and therefore snobbish character. “Democracy is made up of unchosen experiences”; its “contacts are unselected contacts, brought about in the course of duty and intimate cooperation with one’s fellow men, not in the course of taste and social selection.” Members of each Quad Association, including a resident university teacher and students from all four undergraduate classes, would eat and lodge together, “regulat[ing] their own corporate life by some simple method of self-government” to be run by the junior- and senior-class students. (“Grown men should govern themselves, in college or out.”) “We are not seeking to form better clubs” in the social sense of the word, but “academic communities” integrating college study with the residential life of the college. “We are making a university, not devising a method of social pleasure”; artificial social-class distinctions will be replaced by “natural association” “formed and dominated by the natural powers and aptitudes” of its members, offering “the finest possible opportunity for the development of self-government.” Wilson’s plan would have made all aspects of student life “absolutely controlled, not negatively, but constructively and administratively, by the university authorities,” beginning with the resident teachers in each quad. Each aspect of this structure reflects his conception of self-government as a feature of Christian personalism within an overarching university regime dedicated to the Progressive project.

The Christian Progressives of the new leadership class would be professionals, “a race of men schooled and grounded in youth in such learning as opens the mind to a just apprehension of the great questions of statecraft and drilled throughout manhood in the practice-school of national legislation and politics.” Formal and practical training alike would form society-uniting experts in the relations of things instead of class-warring experts in perpetual ‘critique.’

In Wilson’s own academic specialty, political science, Progressivism would be served by advancing the study of what Wilson’s generation had begun to call comparative politics. Political scientists had always compared and contrasted political regimes, as even a glance at Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Politics will reveal. But Wilson and other Progressive political scientists reconceived the field. As the author of The State, probably the first American textbook of the new comparative politics, Wilson wanted students and practitioners of politics to break out of America’s “too narrow” political life featuring “politicians to egotistically content with learning only from themselves.” Modern American leaders should avail themselves of “the general bank and capital of nations.” “I believe that our own institutions can be understood and appreciated only by those who know other systems of government as well, and the main facts of general institutional history.” The purpose of this study will be to enable students to import non-American governmental institutions; Europeans, after all, had more experience in designing bureaucracies than Americans had, given the control of state administrative appointments by political parties in America.

Not all comparative exercises are equally fruitful, however. English books especially maintain our advantage “of being hard-headed Saxons,” whose literature “is so full of action and of thoughts fit for action.” In his books and classroom teaching, Wilson formulated a newer science of politics to replace the “new science of politics” practiced by that earlier Princeton man, James Madison. Wilson intended to ‘de-center’ American political science away from American models, with particular emphasis on such English political scientists as Walter Bagehot and James Bryce, influenced by German political philosophy as Wilson himself had been. American political science must reverse the preference of Noah Webster for American things, leading its students beyond America as conceived by the American Founders and the statesmen who followed in their line, even as parents lead children outside the household.

Hegelian idealism differs from Platonic idealism because Hegel claims that ideas achieve full embodiment whereas in the Platonic dialogues the ideas insofar as they can be seen in human societies (‘justice,’ for example) remain at most standards for human conduct, never to be fully realized in an actual political community. To put the matter in terms of theology, the Holy Spirit of the Bible differs from the Absolute Spirit of Hegel because holiness presupposes separation whereas the Absolute Spirit is immanent in all physical things. As human beings learn to master those physical things, those things become more ‘spiritualized,’ more perfected, by the dialectical process of human thought aimed at such control. Following Hegel, the American Progressives aimed at realizable ideals. Wilson pursued those ideals outside the academy because mere bookishness eclipses individuality by holding it “too long in conjunction with other men’s thoughts; a little treading wisely done waketh a man up, but much reading ceaselessly done putteth him forever to sleep—’perchance to dream,’ but never to dream to any new purpose.” That would not be progressive. He left the professoriate for the executive life, first as president of Princeton, then as governor of New Jersey, finally as president of the United States, all in order to push forward the forces of historical dialectic he was sure were immanent within his own mind and will. His actual, physical body betrayed him, proving a weak reed just when his mind needed the body it inhabited.

In considering education in the United States today, the Christianity of the early Progressives has nearly disappeared. So has some of the confidence in reason, as ‘postmodernism’ undermined the new liberalism beginning in the late 1960s. Yet the techniques of postmodernism—deconstructionism, the attempt to analyze politics in terms of the sub-political categories of race, class, and gender, and similar moves—invariably and contradictorily find themselves at the service of a politics that continues to call itself progressive, nowhere more so than in the schools Dewey, Wilson, and their allies designed for that purpose more than a century past. And the professional classes, managers of ‘discourse’—whom Wilson called “opinion leaders”—remain confidently in place, ruling in tandem with the credentialed experts of the administrative state.

 

 

Review
Michael Novak: On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001.
Originally published in The Washington Times, January 30, 2002.

 

In arguing for a renewed recognition of the religious dimension of the American founding, the eminent Catholic scholar Michael Novak navigates a rocky coastline, Although the Founders explicitly and repeatedly refer to Nature’s God, our Creator, and divine Providence, readers of their correspondence know that some of them defined `God,’ `Creator,’ and `Providence’ in decidedly heterodox ways. Many of the founders unquestionably remained faithful to Christian teachings–the Reverend John Witherspoon of New Jersey and the philanthropist John Jay of New York being among the finest examples. But Thomas Jefferson privately denied the divinity of Christ and defended materialism, and the logic of Benjamin Franklin’s portrait of the great preacher George Whitefield inclines toward blasphemy.

Even if one argues, as Novak does, that the orthodox outnumbered the heterodox, probably among the Founders and surely among the people they represented, how should one understand this, especially today? If the founding was a Christian event simply, does that not leave Jewish, Moslem, and other non- and un-Christian Americans on the outside looking in, at odds with their own country? In redeeming the founders’ Christianity do we undermine their authority among too many Americans now?

Fortunately, Novak proves a skillful pilot. His carefully-drawn navigational chart features two coordinates one religious and one philosophic. Together, they guide us home.

The first coordinate consists of a spirited but never overly sectarian religious polemic, determining biblical points obscured by secularist weather. For example, Novak rightly observes that the founders do not simplistically set Biblical revelation against human reason. They knew that Jesus Himself commands His followers to exhibit the prudence of serpents as well as the harmlessness of doves. The Founders’ Enlightenment was not the Enlightenment of Voltaire; it was the Enlightenment of Locke, a man ever at pains not to tread heavily on Christian sensibilities. The spiritedness that spirituality lends to reason gives strength to the quest for liberty, which might otherwise run to anarchy, on one extreme, or curl up in terror at its enemies, on the other. Christian faith honors the marriage bond, providing stable homes for the inculcation of virtues that free men and women will need, given the dangers of living in freedom. Christians hold themselves under the scrutiny of an all-seeing God; insofar as they do, they are likely to behave better than citizens who suppose that they have no stern if forgiving Judge.

To skeptics who might reply that such a defense of Christianity smells more of utility than piety, Novak has a ready reply. No less a Christian, and no less a mathematician, than Pascal deems faith a prudent wager. What is more supremely useful than the one thing most needful for the salvation of your soul? And where is the impiety of acknowledging such utility?

This religiouse-polemical coordinate of Novak’s chart, taken by itself, might navigator and crw off course. Novak too easily overlooks the radical, Machiavellian challenge to Christianity embedded in the writings of such modern natural-rights philosophers as Hobbes and Locke, to say nothing of their march-of-history descendant-critics, Hegel and Marx, who do not merely secularize Christian providentialism but transform it into a vast and (as it turned out in practice) disastrous attempt to conquer God’s creation and eradicate religion itself. So, to say that the Founders share the biblical understanding that something called `history’ undergoes something called `progress’ entirely misses a simple fact: neither the Bible nor the Founders speak of `history’ as an ontological object. The Declaration of Independence speaks of “the course of human events,” not `history.’ For the Founders, history remains what it was for Aristotle: a literary genre, distinguished from poetry (for example). History is not a process moving inexorably toward the realization of Utopia–an illusion prepared by Machiavelli’s tempting suggestion that one might conquer Fortune. If it were, Leninist fanaticism would have taken firmer hold here, and Washingtonian common sense would have disappeared long ago.

Other examples of religious-polemical overstretch may be seen in such claims that “the very form of the Declaration was that of a that of a traditional prayer” (rather more a logical syllogism and a legal indictment, actually); that faith better than reason fortifies us in performing those acts of virtue no one else can see (that depends upon the nature of the soul performing the acts); that Alexander Hamilton’s refutation of the materialist philosopher Thomas Hobbes implies or requires a Christian understanding of natural right (several non-materialist philosophical doctrines will do). The worst of these distortions comes in the charge that pre-Christian philosophers saw no foundation for equality in nature, that previous human thought on natural right justified conquest and slavery. A careful reading of Aristotle’s teachings on slavery and just war belies this claim, and the philosopher’s understanding of political life as reciprocal ruling and being-ruled contradicts it as well. The Founders could find equality and hierarchy in nature, rationally, even as the ancient philosophers had done.

Novak’s second navigational coordinate corrects such excesses of zeal. The philosophic dimension of his study refines and redefines the meaning of faith. “I am using `faith’ for all propositions about God,” he writes, “even those that in earlier times would have been reached by pre-Christian `pagan’ philosophers who wrote of God.” That is, Novak intends to recover for reason the terrain philosophers imprudently ceded when they cut themselves off theoretically from metaphysics and practically from the commonsense reasoning of classical ethics and political science. The dogmatic atheism of the continental Enlightenment and of German historicism left their proponents stranded on the shoals of tyrannical fanaticism–from Robespierre to Pol Pot. Novak would reclaim the saner reaches of political reasoning.

Doing so yields excellent results, two of which speak to a familiar dilemma in contemporary American politics. Our political landscape has been wracked by storms caused by the icy wind of secularism meeting the warmer wind of religiosity. School prayer, church-state separation, abortion, and censorship of pornography all seem matters of insoluble controversy between determine and irrational partisans. Yet, as Novak indicates, the Founders saw their way clear of such perils.

First, recognizing that no sectarian appeals could persuade many of their fellow Americans (then as now given to diverse religious opinions), Christian statesmen in and out of the pulpit had recourse to that part of the Bible all denominations honored: the Jewish part, the `Old’ Testament, whose eternal newness they acknowledged. “The idiom of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was a religious lingua franca for the founding generation”; one need not agree on, say, the relations among the persons of the Trinity to revere the virtues of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people, those wise and courageous nation-builders. Then as now, American could offer political participation to all `the peoples of the Book.’

Second, recognizing that not everyone is a person of the Book, but that unbiblical persons may still bring considerable virtues to public life, the Founders established their new regime “in carefully modulated language, which could be understood by freethinking atheists in one way by `broadminded’ Unitarians such as Jefferson in another, and by devout Presbyterians such as Witherspoon and partially secularized Puritans as John Adams in yet others.” “While the American eagle rises on both wings, some individuals use both wings comfortably, but others feel at home only on the propulsion of one or the other.” One might add that the eagle’s head, which commands both wings and gives them direction, cries out in the accents of the Declaration of Independence, the accents of a reason that encompasses parts of Revelation.

Natural right, understood as the gift of the Creator-God (however conceived in the privacy of conscience) will be secured by citizens who prudently deliberate with one another about the political institutions and policies they pursue and courageously defend against tyrants who deny and defy natural right. On this point the American Founders can continue to teach us, even as their Constitution, amended, governs us. On this point too, Novak navigates well, so that we can better govern ourselves.