Liberalism/Progressivism and Education

A further iteration of the modernization program, namely the progressive movement in the United States at the turn of the 20^th Century, sought to identify the tensions between labor and capital, black and white, etc., and transform them in line with liberal principles, principles which in the end had as their point of reference modernity in the singular and, connectedly, the division of labor in society. While the many faces of liberalism will not be treated here, the presentation of two contrasting iterations and their views about education will work to highlight conceptual shortcomings. Even the most ardent supporters of reform along egalitarian lines would be disappointed by the imperfect applicability of the liberal educational program. Belief in democracy and the fear of totalitarianism, respectively, as guiding principles are not strong enough to prevent the reproduction of inequalities through education.

John Dewey (2008), who was discussed briefly in the literature review, was a pedagogue, philosopher and political activist who worked to reshape public institutions in the

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United States by attempting to make them more equal. While it would be illuminating to discuss the trials and tribulations of the progressive movement in the United States, it will suffice for the present purposes to talk about Dewey’s ideas in context. Equally enticing would be a critique of philosophical pragmatism, a sets of ideas which have again become fashionable in academia, but this would do little to serve the present purposes. For Dewey, the idea of democracy was of utmost importance, and for democracy to function in the present and to continue functioning into the future, the concepts of education and democracy needed to be combined rationally and humanistically, with the desired end of creating a just society. The conceptual link between liberal or progressive education and democracy is formulated thusly:

It is no accident that all democracies have put a high estimate upon education; that schooling has been their first care and enduring charge. Only through education can equality of opportunity be more than a phrase. Accidental inequalities of birth, wealth, and learning are always tending to restrict the opportunities of some as compared with those of others. Only free and continued education can counteract those forces which are always at work to restore, in however changed a form, feudal oligarchy.

Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife (Dewey 2008: 137-138).

The first sentence in this quotation is dubious at best and can be summed up with two words: wishful thinking. That democracy pays lip service to education is all too straightforward, but even more striking is the conceptual disconnect between democracy and educational policy, a theme roughly covered by Dewey’s second sentence. The fear of democracy and society being overtaken by feudal oligarchy is particularly interesting, especially in light of growing income inequalities across the world. The last sentence, that education serves a kind of midwife role, is of particular importance for the present purposes.

This becomes even more interesting when compared to the Marxian midwife, violence. If (liberal) democracy is in fact the best vehicle for overcoming “accidental inequalities”, and an egalitarian approach to education is the best way to ensure the lifeblood of democracy, then one would expect to see some correlation between democratic health and efficiency and educational innovation and mobility. That the United States, long amongst the paragons of democracy and with a primary and secondary education system that is at least nominally based on egalitarianism, has and has long had striking levels of inequality related to race,

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class, gender and ethnicity speaks to a disconnect between the liberal idea of a democratic society and liberal or even progressive education. It is precisely within this context that Rehbein and Souza (2014) discussed symbolic liberalism.²³ This is a problem for which Dewey seemingly had no answer.

Dewey was not alone in thinking that liberal democracy and progressive education held the keys to a better world, but his orientation ought to be exposed to a kind of critique.

Like Durkheim and Marx, Dewey’s (2015) approach assumed that the current society was the best possible iteration of society, simply meaning that his optimism found its orientation in the future development of the present society. “We cannot set up, out of our heads, something we regard as an ideal society. We must base our conceptions upon societies which actually exist, in order to have any assurance that our ideal is a practicable one” (Chapter 7). Part and parcel of his approach was to pick and choose desirable qualities of the current order while discarding less desirable ones. It bears mentioning that he was most prolific on the heels of the so-called Gilded Age in the United States, a particularly rosy and unreflective time in the country’s history.

Seen through the lens of the growth in wages, the “maturing” of industry and a break in international conflict, it probably seemed all too natural to view pathological social dimensions as being separable from social virtues. The relationship between economic growth and social divisions stemming from race, gender and class, was highly visible, as evidenced by the fact that Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk appeared in 1906 and 1903, respectively, drawing mass attention to questions of class and race. Dewey saw in education the ability to hold onto the good parts of liberal democracy while, through social evolution driven by progressive ideas, discarding the bad parts. Education was to play a defining role in achieving a level of social equality which

23 Interestingly enough, Niklas Luhmann (2001) came to a similar conclusion, although from a different perspective: “society has to reflect on its relationship to the individual, though not by means of property but by means of the state. What emerges from this is that society demands of itself that greater equality and

greater freedom be achieved, even though this idea is unable to explain its own lack of impact” (24).

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would redeem the flowering prose of the country’s founding documents, most notably the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Dewey was perhaps wise for presenting the alternative to democracy as “feudal oligarchy”, because given the choice, one would be hard pressed not to select democracy. This is to say that Dewey’s ideas cannot and should not be unreflectingly spread to the corners of the world.

In the context of a this or that choice, others have come to similar conclusions.

Although it would be folly to suggest that Dewey and Hannah Arendt were cut from the same ideological cloth, comparing their liberalisms and ideas about education is highly instructive.²⁴ Arendt’s (1976) approach to the this or that choice did not have “feudal oligarchy” as the worst choice but, broadly speaking, totalitarianism. While she did not define liberal democracy as the practicable alternative per se, it becomes apparent that this is what she approximately saw as the alternative. The context of her writing, namely the postwar Western world, was framed by two modern, totalitarian snapshots, namely the Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union. To say she was more skeptical of modernity than was Dewey would be a massive understatement. In any event, at first glance it appears her approach to education is highly conservative, at least when compared to Dewey’s approach.

While Dewey viewed education as playing a vital role in shaping liberal democracy in hopes that the benefits of the system would be recognized (via education) and that the evolution of the system would result in a just system, Arendt (1954) highlighted the importance of tradition and authority in education. With regard to the role of educators, she argued that they: “stand in relation to the young as representatives of a world for which they must assume responsibility although they themselves did not make it, and even though they may, secretly or openly, wish it were other than it is” (9-10). This importance of looking back stands in sharp contrast to Dewey’s focus on looking to the future, which in all fairness is probably more symptomatic of the experiences each thinker had. The contrasts in outlooks regarding the Gilded Age in the United States and the postwar European/Jewish experience are obviously huge. Arendt highlighted some general problems with the educational approach

24 In certain respects, Arendt’s approach defies categorization, and her work has been linked to classical liberalism, liberal republicanism (Lloyd 1995: 31) and even neo-conservatism (Judt 2009: 85).

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of her time: “The problem of education…lies in the fact that by its very nature it cannot forgo either authority or tradition, and yet must proceed in a world that is neither structured by authority nor held together by tradition” (13). Authority and tradition, then, become necessary evils which cannot simply be dispensed with.

Arendt’s (1954) solution to the problem, however, can be seen as radically illiberal.

She posits:

We must decisively divorce the realm of education from the others, most of all from the realm of public, political life, in order to apply to it alone a concept of authority and an attitude toward the past which are appropriate to it but have no general validity and must not claim a general validity in the world of grown-ups (13).

Dewey saw education as being of utmost importance for democracy; Arendt, on the other hand, posited that education, far from being a foundational part of a liberal society, should be separated entirely from public and political life, ostensibly to protect education from succumbing to totalitarian political currents.

More to the point, Dewey and Arendt shared similar outlooks when it comes to the basic orientations of education. Arendt (1954), for example, wrote:

And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world (13-14).

The orientation of this renewal is, roughly speaking, away from totalitarian violence and toward a kind of common humanity. Dewey (2015) took his argument even further and provided a minimal point of orientation: “Each generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity” (Dewey 2015: Chapter 7). Combining these two quasi-liberal ideas, a clause can be developed which will provide a conceptual link between these ideas and the ideas to follow. Education plays the role of reinvigorating a common world, and this is only desirable as long as the common world has humanity – skeletally defined – as that entity which it serves. The belief that the system as it

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is or was constructed holds the promise of a better life is the least common denominator between two different sides of the liberal spectrum, namely Arendt and Dewey. The blind spots inherent to these brands of liberalism preclude them from being viable solutions to the problem of the reproduction of educational inequality. In other words, India’s and Germany’s educational situations would not improve by becoming more liberal. The link between Dewey’s liberalism and Rehbein’s critical theory – humanity as humanity and the good life – is an important one, although humanity in Dewey’s rendering was a loaded concept.

Now that modernity has been defined as a concept, analyzed in terms of its implementation across social worlds and discussed with specific reference to liberalism and education, the theoretical focus can migrate to the various post-isms which have been used to explain and to forecast the social world. It is the author’s expressed hope that the various juxtapositions presented above lead not to the kind of clarity that can be summed up in the course of a single sentence but rather the kind that emerges via interrogation. By themselves, the ideas presented so far portray a rather fuzzy picture; together with the actual comparison between the changes in the education systems of Germany and India, however, the reasons underlying theoretical decisions made in the course of this work will hopefully become evident.

Again, the present author is not entirely comfortable subsuming social thoughts under categories. Labelling a given approach can be useful in terms of allowing for categorical thinking, but the ideas themselves are much more illuminating than the labels. In much the same way that Marx did not consider himself a Marxist (Anyon 2011: 7), it is unlikely that any given thinker would accede to having her or his ideas confined to a demarcated school of thought. This is, of course, precisely how things unfold: an idea is assigned to a given school of thought (with a neo- or even post- attached to it), jargon for the school of thought is created or re-created, acceptable theories which fully incorporate the jargon are published, and then seemingly new ideas are subsumed under the category which has been established as a label for the nascent or even mature school of thought. Wash, rinse and repeat. This idea is especially relevant in the context of post-modern theories.

The theoretical and historical link between social thought and education is rife with problems. This subsection and the previous ones, 3.3.1. - 3.3.3., have revealed fundamental problems concerning how the social world and education can be imagined, giving rise to the topic of Chapter 4. There is no way that Durkheim, Weber, Marx or Gandhi could have been

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able to preempt such issues in their musings on the links between society and education.

Adhering to a functionalist and/or rational approach to education and designing school systems to react to the perceived needs of the division of labor, however, leads to the exacerbation of inequality through processes which will be outlined in Chapter 4. The German and Indian approaches to the link between secondary education and society are aligned with ideas which, however brilliant and insightful, have lost much of their validity, as evinced by the critiques embedded above. These ideas, however, still form the wobbly foundations upon which the German and Indian education systems stand. To borrow a term from engineering, the structural integrity of the systems has become suspect.

3.4. Conclusion

Durkheim, Marx and Weber sought to arrive at universal laws about how society and history function. The guiding principles behind their attempts were the division of labor in society and/or rationalization. Their ideas about the relationship between society and education reflect these seemingly universal guiding principles. Gandhi was tackling problems of a different kind. In contrast to the other three thinkers, his educational notions were not connected to a larger defining logic, an open-ended orientation to knowledge. The discussion about modernity and modernization attempts to find a middle ground of sorts between Durkheim, Weber, Marx and Gandhi by suggesting that there are indeed multiple notions of the modern and that there is a seemingly unbridgeable tension between the universal and the relative. These tensions will be explored in Chapter 4. The discussion surrounding liberalism/progressivism is an attempt to show that orientations toward more benign concepts such as democracy and anti-totalitarianism cannot in and of themselves prevent the reproduction of social inequalities through education.

Chapter 3 represents merely the first theoretical step. In order for secondary education systems in Germany and India to free themselves of conservatism and to promote emancipatory social change, due attention must be given to critical theory in general and the kaleidoscopic dialectic in particular so that the pacifying effects of liberal rhetoric can be transcended.

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