Hello and welcome to my second website at weebly.com: Liberal Education. This site is a little different from my first one. At liberalexcellence.weebly.com I offered readers a general liberal view of life and nature. In essence it was a popularization of America's greatest liberal thinker, John Dewey. At this site, however, a more specific topic is focused on -- education. For Dewey it was one of the most important studies of all, especially in all countries wanting to build more democratic institutions and habits. Here, concerned parents, students, and teachers will see not only why our conservative book-based public schools are weak, but more importantly, how they can be improved with more liberal ideas and practices. Thus, with this website, people will be better able to compare their own neighborhood public schools with a liberal model, and also learn some basic reasons why more liberal schools should be built. After all, our present public school system was designed and built essentially by conservative educators for a majority of white college-bound male students; however, not only is such a majority rapidly changing, but today around 70% of students don't go on to college, if they graduate at all.
In other words, our conservative public school system is rapidly becoming obsolete to most young Americans, and probably most young people around the world, where practical skills and knowledge are the most useful skills to learn. No doubt, to many conservatives such ideas paint a very negative picture of our public schools; most of the ideas talked about here, they may say, are simply too outrageous to even consider, like the use of the word feudalistic to describe many of our institutions today. Well, such ideas don't bother me in the least. Considering the state of educational debate in this country today, I'm proud to offer an educational model that's bold, confrontational, and also badly needed throughout the country. I'll leave it to readers to decide how good this model is, and how accurate its criticisms are.
In any case, however, I want to thank all the great folks at weebly.com for all their kind and generous help in getting this important book into cyberspace so people around the world can start reading it and hopefully learning how to build better and more liberal public schools. They remain a crucially important part of any kind of democratic growth and health, and for making our world a safer and more enjoyable place to live.
Jerome King
P.S. Please go to the Contributions Page next, and help our world become a more satisfying and rewarding place to live.
Page 1.1: Contents to Section 6
Contents
Opening Quotes
1. The Need for Liberal Schools
2. Education Highlights: Ancient
3. Education Highlights: Medieval
4. Education Highlights: Modern
5. Liberal Education’s Scientific Roots
6. The Basic Conservative Educational Challenge
Page 1.2
7. Liberal Education’s 4 Basic Values
8. More About Dewey’s Learning Model
9. Liberal Education's New Learning Art
10. Overcoming Challenges, Solving Problems
11. Passive and Active Education
12. Intelligent Work and Social Results
Page 1.3
13. Character Excellence: 101
14. Character Excellence: 102
15. Character Excellence: 103
16. Character Excellence: 104
17. Character Excellence: 105
Page 1.4
18. Character Excellence: 106
19. Spare the Rod, Improve a Life
20. Enjoyable Learning
21. Hollywood Talk
22. Liberating Tools
Page 1.5
23. To Advertise or Not
24. Is Health Our Greatest Wealth?
25. What Are Ideas?
26. Education Psych: Faculties v. Experimentation
27. IQ, You Q, We All Q
Page 1.6
28. How Faulty is Faculty Psychology?
29. Curiosity and Creativity
30. Desiring to Learn
31. The Eight Year Study
32. Debating Educational Assumptions
Page 1.7
33. More Reasons, More Solutions
34. Charter Schools
35. Reality Schools: Dewey’s Basic Position
36. Reality Schools: Biological Health
37. Reality Schools: Psychological Health
Page 1.8
38. Reality Schools: Economic Health
39. Reality Schools: Democratic Health
40. Getting From Here to There?
Opening Quotes
John Dewey: It is impossible that (philosophy) should have any success ...without educational equivalents as
to what to do and what not to do. ...the cause of the indefinite improvement of humanity and the cause of
the little child are inseparably bound together. ...the measure and worth of any social institution ...is its effect in enlarging and improving experience... ...the learning in school should be continuous with that out of school. ...If there is especial need of educational reconstruction at the present time ...it is because of the thoroughgoing change in social life accompanying the advance of science, the industrial revolution, and the development of democracy. ...A progressive society count individual variation as precious since it finds in them the means of its own growth. ...Ideals express possibilities; but they are genuine ideals only in so far as they are
possibilities of what is now moving. ..The educational process has no end beyond itself...
A. J. Ayer: The moral problem is: what am I to do?
Antiphon the Sophist: Primary among human concerns is education, for in any enterprise when the beginning is right,
the outcome is likely to be right too. When good education is ploughed into young persons, its effect lives and
burgeons throughout their lives.
Heraclitus of Ephesus: CHARACTER is destiny. …education is another sun to bask in...
Epicharmus (Sicilian comic writer): …the best thing to have is health.
Socrates of Athens: My good friends ...are you not ashamed of caring for money and how to get as much of it as you
can, and for honor and reputation, and not caring ...for wisdom and truth and for your psyche (your character), and how to make it as good as possible?
Democritus: Teaching reforms a man, and in reforming him makes him mature. ...Fortunate is the man who is cheerful with moderate possessions, and unfortunate he who is unhappy with many.
Confucius: Provide education for all people without discrimination.
Plato: Education ...the one great thing. ... a free psyche ought not to pursue any study slavishly ... nothing that is learned under compulsion stays with the mind.
Aristotle: ... the legislator should direct his attention above all to ... education... ... youths are not to be instructed ... to their amusement, for learning is no amusement, but is accompanied with pain. ... What we learn to do we learn by doing. .... moral virtue comes about as a result of habit...
Dwight Eisenhower (Republican US President): Educators, parents, and students must be continuously stirred up by the defects in our educational system. They must be induced to abandon the educational path that, rather blindly, they have been following as a result of John Dewey's teachings.
Hyman Rickover, U S. Navel Admiral: For all children the educational process must be one of collecting factual knowledge ... Nothing can really make it fun.
Upton Sinclair: ... my college education, which had left out socialism, and money and love, and marriage, had
also left out diet and health.
Martin Luther King Jr. : I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be
judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Barry Goldwater (Republican Presidential Candidate): The specter of single-issue religious groups is growing over our land. ...I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?
Andrew Carnegie: What is money but dross to the true hero?
Friedrich Nietzsche: ...out of a concern for happiness man tied off the veins of scientific investigation--and does so still today. ...Higher men are distinguished from lower, by seeing and hearing immensely more, and in a thoughtful manner... ...To ‘give style’ to one’s character--that is a grand and rare art! He who surveys all that his nature
presents in its strength and in its weakness, and then fashions it into an ingenious plan, until everything appears artistic and rational, and even the weaknesses enchant the eye...exercises that admirable art.
H.G. Wells: The essential factor in the organization of the living state...is...education. ...by the standards of what it might be, America is an uneducated country. ...From the days of the first Christian propaganda, popular educating has been smoldering in Europe, just as it has smoldered in Asia, wherever Islam has set its foot,...enabling
(the believer) to read a little of the sacred books... Christian controversies...ploughed the ground for the harvest of popular education.
Anonymous: There is no limit to either intelligence or ignorance. ...A modern college is a place where 2,000 can be seated in the classrooms, and 50,000 in the stadium.
Mark Twain: I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
R. Mackenzie: My education was so sound that I hardly know anything.
Ambrose Bierce: Education: that which discloses to the wise, and disguises from the foolish, their lack of
understanding.
Ralph Emerson: We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
Epictetus: If you would make anything a habit, do it...
William James: The hell (of the hereafter)...is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by
habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.
Bertrand Russell: Passive acceptance of the teacher’s wisdom is easy for most boys and girls... Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes men to seek a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position.
Abby Hoffman: In American … society the university is traditionally considered to be a psychosocial
moratorium, an ivory tower where you withdraw from the problems of society and the world around you to work on important things like your career and your marriage.
George B. Shaw: We must not live for ourselves alone... I conclude that the secret of a genuine liberal education is to learn what you want to know for the sake of your own enlightenment, and not let anybody teach you anything
whatever for the purpose of pulling you through an examination. ...School was to me a sentence of penal
servitude.
John Dewey: When the school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little
community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious. ...education is a constant reorganizing and reconstructing of experience. ...the educational center of
gravity is in the cultural or humane aspects of the study... ...the establishing of character is a comprehensive aim in school instruction...
Robert Ingersoll: ...intelligence, guided by kindness, is the highest possible wisdom. ...Superiority is born of
honesty, of virtue, of charity, and above all, of the love of liberty. ...I believe the time will come when
there will be charity in every heart, love in every family, and law, liberty, and justice will surround this world.
...the man who acts best his part--who loves his friends the best--is most willing to help others...who has the best heart--the most feeling--and the deepest sympathies--and who freely gives to others the rights he claims for
himself is the best man. ...It is a great thing to preach philosophy--far greater to live it.
Jane Addams: We are impatient with the schools which lay all stress on reading and writing. (It) fails to give the child any clew to the life about him.
Herbert Spencer: What knowledge is of most worth?
Martin Luther King Jr.: We must remember intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character -- that is the goal of true education.
Christopher O. Weber: Education will become what we make it to become.
Jules Henry: ...learning (how) to learn has been, and continues to be, Homo Sapiens' most formidable evolutionary task. ...the cultural pattern (in education) has been a device for binding the intellect. In the 1300s Muslim
teachers used to chain boys up until they memorized the Koran... ...schools are the central conserving force of the culture. ...The function of education has never been (on a large scale) to free the mind and spirit of man, but to bind them (to the cultural-tribal patterns)... ...sameness was the road to approval and love, difference to the dangerous unknown... ...schools train children to fit the culture, rather than improve it... ...questioning--creativity itself--must be limited... ...a vital democracy can only be the product of a disciplined and intelligent population... ...disorder and
laxity are poison to democracy... ...learning to be narrow, stupid, and absurd, as well as alienate the
self from new and more useful experiments (have too often been the results of education)...
John Dewey: The only freedom...of enduring importance is freedom of intelligence... the formation of (constructive) purposes and the organization of means to execute them are the work of intelligence. ...Where schools are equipped with laboratories, shops, and gardens, where (enjoyable) dramatizations, plays, and games are freely used, opportunities exist for reproducing situations of life, and for acquiring and applying information and ideas ... of progressive experiences...
Benjamin Disraeli (British PM): The first consideration of a minister is the health of the people.
SECTION 1
THE NEED FOR LIBERAL SCHOOLS
Welcome to one of the most important subjects of all – the philosophy of education. We start with a brief glance at the on-going social battle between liberals and conservatives, especially in education. We Deweyan liberals see a major contradiction in the conservative position on education. They seem never to tire of saying government is the problem, not the solution. And yet they continue using governments around the world to enslave children to a book-centered model of education and testing! In such schools books and teachers become the center of attention, rather than student needs themselves. We liberals say that educational model is not only a contradiction of conservative small-government principles, but it's disrespectful to young folks themselves, who continue to be told their own educational needs and wants are irrelevant.
Around the world today democracy continues budding out from its conservative feudalistic branch, but its growth will remain small, weak, and confined unless it’s energized and nourished by liberal democratic schools, homes, and churches. For us Deweyan liberals, the child's needs and wants should, within reason, become the center of education, In short, education and democratic power are organically fused together in the real world, and each generation plays a part in their growth, or non-growth as the case may be.
Thus, an educational choice becomes available. What kind of a world do we want to keep building, a conservative feudalistic world where power stay concentrated in small undemocratic decision-making centers, and focused on mainly gaining more wealth and power for themselves, or do we want to keep building a world where such power is more equally shared, and where democratically increasing the public good is the main goal?
Over the past 40 years, from 1980 to 2010, liberal politics, economics, and education have been weakened by
concentrated conservative attacks in many small ways. Democratic liberalism was a growing social force from 1900 to 1950. There were strong growth spurts, so to speak, in the early 1900s, the 1930s, and the 1960s, but since then, conservative economic power has been used to turn liberal ideas and laws into a much weaker force for the public good, like fewer well-paying jobs, less union bargaining power, and even educational programs teaching little knowledge and skills useful for high schools graduates in the real world. Around the world unemployment rates for the 18-25 years old often are as high as 50%, and even higher in some places. Many conservatives like that situation; it makes filling army jobs that much easier.
How did such things happen? How have our governments, economies, and schools returned to conservative undemocratic models, and thus helped build huge personal fortunes for a few, around 30,000, and in effect
enslave most all students to learning knowledge they’ll rarely use as adults? This book will talk about such events, but more importantly, also describe what liberal kinds of schools and other institutions can look like.
What makes schools feudalistic and conservative, or any institution for that matter? That’s easy. All such institutions are simply run by a small, usually unelected, group of decision-makers, who then control what students, workers, and taxpayers should do. In short, any institution run from the top down, so to speak, is defined here as a conservative feudalistic one. It’s been the social status quo for thousands of years, and so it’s easy to define them that way.
Furthermore, in such schools more and more students have become disconnected mentally and physically from knowing what’s happening in the real world, and more importantly, from learning how to intelligently make our
institutions more liberal and democratic. Thus such schools are making it easier for conservatives to keep building their own wealth and power, and recently to even start taking taxpayer money in some so-called Charter schools. Other conservative educational programs are called No Child Left Behind, signed into law in 2,002 by conservative President George W. Bush, the Common Core Standards movement begun even before that, and even Democratic President Barack Obama’s Rise to the Top funding program. It certainly isn’t difficult to see why. Politicians must get campaign re-election funds from wealthy donors, and many of them are quite conservative people. So, we liberal Deweyans ask, shouldn't the public have an educational choice besides conservative public schools and conservative charter schools? To us the answer is obviously yes. Tax payers should have the freedom to build more liberal schools if they so choose.
For thousands of years now civilization has been the site of on-going battles between liberals and conservatives. For what? For many people shear social power is the ultimate drug. Conservatives have wanted to keep their power and control over people, so as to make their own lives easier and more comfortable. For thousands of years serf-farmers have been supplying food for their tables and soldiers for their wars. Liberals, on the other hand, have fought to free themselves from such a system, wanting social equality and equal opportunities; history is full of slave-revolt stories. Conservatives, on the other hand, have worked, and still work, and still work, to keep their social forms of power in the hands of a few while ignoring equal human rights and the public good. What’s more, down through history to this day, conservatives have also used religious ideas and habits to promote obedience; the phrase ‘god’s will’ echoes to this day. In fact, it’s been used to justify a feudalistic political, economic, and education program for thousands of years, as we’ll see a little later!
As a result, for most of history during the past 5,000 years, conservative ideas and habits have remained widespread, strong, and dominant; not because they were really eternally True and unchanging, but because people were educated to accept them, often with military force. Mainly they've remained dominant simply because they were what young folks were made to learn, generation after generation throughout the centuries. Also important was how such ideas and habits were taught. Again, history teaches us brutal violence was often a conservative educational tool, such as the Inquisition and religious wars. As cities grew religious ideas were used to justify conservative forms of political, economic, and educational power. For example, for an Egyptian commoner even to look at the god-pharaoh meant death; heads were to remain bowed and obedient.
Eventually, in ancient Greece, conservative and moderate philosophic ideas also became useful tools in such cultural battles, conservative Plato's and moderate Aristotle's in particular. For thousands of years all of Christian philosophy itself was dominated by their ideas. Even in our modern era, US history and education offers many examples of those basic battles for power, again with conservatives winning many of them due, in large part, to their economic power.
Until quite recently praying in public schools was commonplace. After the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution made money the main weapon in such battles. In the late 1800s, for example, money helped build a very conservative Supreme Court composed mostly of corporate lawyers; in 1896 they even ruled states could build 'separate but equal facilities' for whites and Africans, thus continuing to deny Africans their equal human rights and maintaining their control over them.
Because ancient, medieval, and modern conservatives largely controlled what students learned, often using pain to teach them, it's been fairly easy for them to keep increasing their feudalistic economic, political, and educational power. Throughout the 1900s, for example, many Africans were simply murdered while working for their equal rights. Childhood habits of obedience to the teacher and book-assignments in conservative schools made adult obedience to political, economic, and military leaders that much easier. In other words, neighborhood schools themselves have, to this day, remained yet another very useful conservative weapon in their battles with liberal democrats. Such schools helped encourage conservative feudalistic systems against independent thinking, popular democracy, and democratic equal rights. However, with such forms of feudalistic power life itself has remained much more difficult and stressful for millions of people.
Feudalistic systems? Is that phrase really too radical? Not with the definition of feudalistic mentioned above. It simply means and undemocratic organization! Who wants to question, for example, their work-supervisors when children need food and there’s a mortgage or rent to pay? And so many feudalistic forms of power still exist, even in the US and around the world! Such systems are still alive, well, and growing today in economics, for example, with huge monopolistic corporations in finance, energy, weapons-making, and transportation. No doubt, they help make constructing large projects like interstate highway systems easier to build, but at the same time they also make controlling them with laws aimed at the public good much more difficult. What politicians want to pass laws against those who finance their elections?
In US politics, too, such feudalistic systems take the form, say, of a small unelected Supreme Court, as well as our largely economically controlled legislatures. Wealthy donors often use their great wealth to create negative ads against those they don’t want elected. In education too, conservative laws like the kind-and-gentle-sounding No Child Left Behind law actually dictates what teachers must teach and students must learn to graduate, as well as judging teacher effectiveness with the help of standardized test results. If students get low test scores, then teachers are not doing their rightful jobs; conservatives want to hold teachers accountable for what many see as academic trivia, justified with the idea of producing well-rounded students. So, naturally democratic liberals like John Dewey asked why should students be forced to learn what they have little need or desire to learn? And of course our feudalistic undemocratic armed services still operate largely as they did in the Middle Ages. In them democracy is almost non-existent and one's basic human and political rights to, say, equal protection under the law is often neglected and ignored. As a result, even sexual abuse is rapidly becoming all too common even today.
Thus, we liberals see all such undemocratic conservative systems as medieval, feudalistic, and thus dangerous to a democracy aiming at improving the common good, especially building better schools. Never since the 1920s has there been such a huge economic class difference in the US! What’s more, how can more people easily become more aware of dangerous economic events, like housing and stock market scams, if economic knowledge is largely ignored in our schools, and it is? Many people may feel we're now living in a completely new and modern era, but in fact undemocratic, conservative, and medieval feudalistic organizations continue controlling much of civilized life itself, economically, politically, and educationally! That is the basic reality seen through liberal eyes. Huge profit-making for the already obscenely wealthy, with war after war after war, and paying for them with public taxes, is yet more evidence of how the lower classes remain enslaved to their wealthy upper classes and their political leaders, made all the easier with conservative schools working throughout the land, and their building of passive habits of obedience in young folks. Such greedy conservative politics have created such hatred for us around the world, our own government has begun collecting electronic information on all US citizens, despite our Constitution’s 4thAmendment guaranteeing all citizens the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures!
For us Deweyan liberals, a powerful antidote to such a situation is more liberal public schools. Here’re some more recent results of conservative actions. Over the past 40 years, for example, conservative anti-democratic power has been increasing in all those systems! Corporations have become more powerful through mergers and cutting their labor costs with cheap foreign workers. Politicians have thus become more controllable with more campaign funds, and schools have become more conservative with the No Child Left Behind law, passed in 2002. Recently several congressional bills have been introduced to change some of its more obnoxious results, but so far none have been signed into law. Also, one very stressful economic result for people has been freezing of salaries paid to more and more people, as well as job losses with shipping jobs overseas. In short, simply making ends meet and paying one's bills have become much more stressful for millions of Americans, not to mention many more losing their homes and becoming homeless from the latest housing scam!
As a result, democratic power keeps declining. In fact, recently such increased conservative control is causing even many educated skeptics and cynics to question democracy's power itself. Some in North America and Europe are now convinced even democratic politics has become almost completely controlled by the wealthiest, thus making even elections incapable of controlling our huge and powerful feudalistic corporations. They’re become freer to even avoid taxes altogether and send more and more of their profits to off-shore bank accounts, all with the government’s blessing!
Democracy, it seems, has lost its power to promote the public good, and more importantly, also create more liberal schools where the next generation learns basic educational habits of excellence. Fewer adults have been taught to build intelligent habits like experimental learning, critical and constructive thinking, non-obedience to the status quo, building more democratic power-sharing organizations, learning useful character habits of respect for others and our just laws, and even basic practical business skills so they can start earning a decent living after high school. What matters most is not how many degrees one has, but how quickly one can learn new skills and knowledge.
A recent article entitled The Democratic Disconnect said: "Democracy is in trouble. The collective engagement of a concerned citizenry for the public good ... is eroding. Democratic governments often seem crippled ... to deliver what their people want and need." (E. J. Dionne, The Washington Post, 5-20-13) So, it seems more important than ever for we liberals to ask: Have the conservatives finally won the battle to keep all their undemocratic and feudalistic forms of social power in place, including schools, corporations, the government, and the military? Should we liberals finally wave a white flag of surrender, once and for all, and meekly accept a feudalistic reality as too powerful to change?
This book’s answer is CERTAINLY NOT!! No human system is too powerful to make more democratic if enough people want it! As history also teaches us again and again, that’s the key weapon no conservative organization can withstand -- human democratic power! Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation is, perhaps, the best example of that power; to this day conservatives continue working to end it, all in the name of merely making more money, and thus strengthening their economic power. So, the important question for we liberals is what can ordinary people do to start taking better control of their neighborhoods, and our nation, and keep the battle alive and growing for democratic equal rights? What educational ideas can liberals use to start experimenting with in their own
neighborhood schools?
This book, Liberal Education, is largely based on John Dewey’s educational ideas. It offers both liberals and independents many ideas to test in their own neighborhood schools for ending dangerous and stressful feudalistic systems throughout society. For too long conservative schools have helped make life easy for the wealthy, and more difficult for everyone else! In fact, John Dewey (1859-1952) was one of America's greatest liberal thinkers, and his educational ideas were once practiced by hundreds of schools around the country in the 1920s and '30s! They also helped encourage labor unions to grow and demand more power in the corporate decision-making process, with the help of strikes and boycotts. Ever since, however, conservatives have been attacking labor unions and their power, as well as liberal schools! They knew how dangerous they were to their own feudalistic power. However, today, such liberal schools can be just as useful, practical, and supportive of democratic ideals as they ever were! In them intelligent, active, constructive, questioning democratic habits are taught with active kinds of intelligent experimentation. Such liberal habits pose a direct threat to all forms of conservative and concentrated feudalistic power, based on obedience and acceptance of the status quo! In liberal schools students are taught the habit-art of intelligent decision-making and also learning what their elected officials are doing here and now with the public’s money. In fact, after 1600 such intelligent experimental habits of learning are what finally broke the conservative religious monopoly on their models of Truth, and thus liberated people from obedience to them to start growing our strongest and most reliable kinds of truth – experimental truth.
In short, though conservative power may seem too strong today, there are in fact many good educational weapons liberals can start using in the battle to make our nation more democratic, intelligent, secure, stable, and caring for everyone, not just a wealthy upper class. Much of the US may still be dominated and controlled by a small wealthy and powerful conservative upper class, with about 1 million people, but our local neighborhood schools are just as important to us liberals today as they've even been! In fact, they're the best places for all liberals to help the next generation learn what intelligent liberal democratic ideas and habits feel like and how they can be practiced. As long as that happens, any democracy will remain alive and growing. We Deweyan liberals simply have no time or patience to accept negative and defeatist feelings!
Liberal neighborhood schools are always a very important tool for building a more stable and enjoyable democratic life for everyone. They are the basic building blocks of all healthy democracies. So, if they aren't built and supported, then conservative and concentrated feudalistic power already in place will continue dominating our social lives, separating people into extreme economic classes of rich and poor, and also dominating our political and educational systems. We can see some dangerous results of such concentrated feudalistic power in many of our own universities today. In many of them student fees and tuition costs are being raised by largely unelected boards of trustees (yet another nice-sounding phrase). Why should such people really be trusted? Job prospects continue shrinking and student debt is now over $1 Trillion dollars, much of which will go to wealthy bankers! So, we liberals say even that feudalistic system can be changed for the better. The more students and teachers demand an equal democratic voice in school board decisions, the less feudalistic and dangerous our universities will remain for both students and teachers! As it is now, wealthy conservatives often control which professors are rewarded and encouraged, and which aren’t.
In fact, liberal democratic freedoms themselves depend directly on people being free to start experimenting with better educational ideas, especially in their own neighborhood schools! Why? Simply because there are better facts and habits to teach, as well as better ways of learning them! After all, public taxes pay for our schools, so why shouldn't they too work for the public good? For us Deweyan liberals, education means much more than making students passively sit at their desks working teacher-given assignments of basically academic trivia. Why should they? This is perhaps the key statistic for us liberal Deweyans: About 70% of high school students don't go to college, so why are they being told to learn such academic knowledge and facts? There are many other useful habits and basic skills they can be learning, so they can start making some honest money after they graduate, instead of becoming unemployed or working for what many call slave wages!
Thus 2 questions become very important: what other ideas can our neighborhood schools be teaching, and how should they be teaching such subjects? Liberal answers based largely on John Dewey's work will help answer those 2 fundamentally important educational questions.
More Reasons for Liberal Schools
No doubt, to a small number of people academic facts and knowledge are useful, like paleontologists, doctors, scholars, researchers, writers, and engineers. However, as our high drop-out rates around the nation keep telling us, sometimes as high as 50%, to many students such facts are seen as academic trivia they neither want or need to know. Passing the conservative No Child Left Behind law in fact gave the conservative educational model a virtual monopoly for teaching such facts in our public schools! As we’ll see in Section 35, the results of that conservative education law have been producing less than excellent results not only for many teachers, but for some 70% of students who don’t go to college! Thus we liberals need to ask: Why make most all students learn mere academic facts when they're not needed or wanted? In fact, it’s a form of educational slavery from conservatives who keep boasting about being the defenders of freedom and liberty! Such slavery also creates more discipline problems for teachers.
For us liberals, the conservative agenda seems obvious: They want children to form habits of obedience and acceptance to what their supervisors tell them to do! With such habits conservative anti-democratic forms of government and religion have remained strong and dominant for the last 5,000 years! Workers are made to accept what they’re given, not what they rightly deserve – a fair and equal share of their profits. So we ask: Why shouldn't all students be free to learn democratic forms of education, like learning what they want to learn? And in that process also start learning how to actively and experimentally build intelligent habits useful throughout life? Perhaps now more than ever, such habits are needed in a nation still dominated by profits and money, and in which many feudalistic forms of life continue on? Why shouldn't students start learning how to intelligently build a healthful body-mind, so they can build similar businesses, learn to respect people and our just laws, and how to best keep teaching themselves new and useful character habits, like wit and humor? Students would learn such habits in more liberal schools.
Even in the early 1900s, liberal educators like John Dewey said schools ignoring those kinds of active democratic habits are, in fact, helping create many unhealthful personal and social results, for which all taxpayers pay the price. How bad is it getting? You tell me. Somewhere around 50% of students in cities like Los Angeles today are actively rejecting such a conservative educational model and simply dropping out before learning many important liberal habit-arts for living intelligently in a modern democratic society. Many conservatives don’t mind; they like to have such people working for them; they tend to accept whatever pay they’re offered and follow orders. Docile, undereducated, and obedient workers make it easier to keep profits growing! Socially, however, it's easier for juvenile and adult crime to grow, as well as police forces and prisons to keep growing, especially when people don’t know how to make an honest living. Such young adults are also more afraid to strike and demand more democratic decision-making power where they work. They also make selling more products easier and more profitable, everything from deodorant to cars to the next war, thus helping keep millions in debt and enslaved to their menial jobs.
We liberal Deweyans say the most intelligent and best way to start ending such stressful habits and feudalistic actions is with the building of more liberal schools! For example, it’s easy to imagine many solutions to our present social and economic problems, like building more public state banks, taxing huge corporations for all their financial trades, limit money-obsessed hedge funds, and pass more regulatory laws. But unless the next generation is educated to keep making our nation more democratic and peaceful, then conservatives can easily keep their power in place by working to have such laws revoked. With more democratic habits it’ll be much easier for people to start demanding the power to say what their tax money be spent for, rather than continue obediently giving it to politicians who are largely controlled by our huge economic corporations. In such a situation it becomes fairly easy to keep giving such corporations huge amounts of money to keep building more weapons and military bases overseas, even
though most all of them don’t help make our nation any more secure and safe!
No doubt, those wealthy folks working to preserve their own concentrated forms of feudalistic power, in our political, economic, and educational systems, are not bothered by such drop-out rates, but it hurts them too. More and more taxes are needed from them to pay for more government services, like prisons and healthcare. No doubt, many support politicians who will support their small-government ideas, and allow them to keep sending more of their profits to tax-exempt offshore banks! After all, conservatives since Plato have wanted habits of obedience to the social status quo; for him young people should be taught to act only when they’re told to; creative and democratic thinking and acting were in fact dangerous to social stability. And, he helped justify such conservative obedient habits by saying human nature itself is naturally divided into distinct classes with different learning abilities; most people are only capable of following orders! Aristotle too said some people are slaves by nature. Thus the lower classes should be made to obey those who really know the Truth. Thousands of years ago, however, the more democratic Confucius saw more clearly the educational reality: When people are truly educated, class distinctions disappear. In short, excellent liberal education aims to build the best defense against feudalistic power by building habits of equality and equal opportunity in the next generation!
Are our conservative book-oriented public schools really that bad for democracy? Well, the social results of unemployment, criminal behavior, drop-out statistics, and drug-use continue showing us how weak the social results are of such schools. When formal character excellence is ignored, such results are common. Obviously some useful habits are learned in conservative schools, like how important book-knowledge can be, but they can become much better with more liberal ideas and practices. By teaching mainly useless facts and knowledge, they certainly contribute to our many social problems. In fact, far too many of the next generation are now leaving school and entering their adult years with knowing hardly anything about intelligent experimental learning, and how that habit-art has become our strongest learning tool! With it, it becomes much easier to keep learning socially excellent and helpful character habits, law-abiding skills, and how to intelligently keep working for the public good, rather than merely for some greedy corporation’s wealth and profits.
In short, most students in conservative schools simply haven't been formally taught what it's like to actively feel
enjoyment while working intelligently, how to think and act creatively and experimentally, how to identify weak, excessive, and unhealthful personal and social actions, how to intelligently solve them one step at a time, why habits of obeying just laws and helping others help produce excellent results, and how to intelligently keep expanding their own limited and confining habits! In short, they haven't yet gone to a liberal democratic public school, where such habits are formally taught on a daily basis, like how to keep making our society more democratic and how to keep improving our own neighborhoods, rather than leaving them neglected and unproductive.
Today, educational battles between liberals and conservatives continue on just as they have for centuries! Conservatives know full well, teaching children such liberal democratic habits weaken their feudalistic social and economic power. A corporation of liberal workers would simply demand an equal share of decision-making power and equalize salaries, or else shut down the business! And the same could happen in our schools, our political systems, and our military as well! Military leaders used to lead their armies; now they often sit safely at their desks and command centers. Thus conservative CEOs, educators, and politicians simply don’t want to democratically share their decision-making power with anyone except a small group, like corporate boards of directors; for one thing, it might decrease many of their own obscene CEO incomes!
For such reasons, conservatives want nothing more than to keep educational laws like No Child Left Behind firmly in place! They want to continue forcing most every student to keep learning more soon-forgotten academic facts, or else drop out. Many conservatives simply do not want more students learning more about economic, political, or educational reality, like how many of our 1 million super-rich people today already own or control about 50% of our nation’s wealth, thus increasing life’s stresses for more than 300,000,000 people while decreasing opportunities for them! They also do not want young folks learning more about how to keep making our feudalistic systems more democratic, or how to elect more liberally progressive politicians to help with that goal. Again, such knowledge would only help weaken their own feudalistic corporate power to elect only those obedient to them! Often they justify such results saying the wealthy are the real job creators, so they need more money; it’s called the Trickle Down economic theory, popularized during the conservative Reagan administration. The last 40 years of economic stagnation, huge job losses, the growth of huge banks, and 3 major wars show us the results of that theory.
More About Conservative Social Systems
Feudalistic institutions, in this day and age? Definitely! In fact, they’re still the dominant form of social organization in the world today, and many thinkers have justified them on paper. Any feudalistic, undemocratic political, economic, and educational system can easily be designed on paper to produce excellent social results. Many have already been built, from Plato’s Republic to Adam Smith's laissez-faire capitalism to modern-day Socialism to Russian and Chinese state capitalism. For example, Smith's model of laissez-faire economics said capitalism is a self-regulating system; within it are built-in regulations to make everyone's life better; government should thus stay out of the economic realm. In practice, however, such an unregulated economy soon produced a flock of small monopolistic and powerful corporations free to set any prices they wanted, pay workers as little as they could, help elect obedient politicians, and thus continue taking as much money from people as they could; so much for Smith’s rosy self-regulating economic model.
And of course Jefferson's small government idea sounded great on paper. In practice, however, where it really counts, it allowed more obnoxious and stressful social results for most everyone. Politicians told people they shouldn't interfere with businesses; it might disrupt economic laws! Thus corporate monopolies continued growing. Then, from 1920 to 1932, after 12 years of practicing such conservative small government ideas, the result was the worst economic depression in US history, with thousands of bank failures, savings losses, and 25% unemployment! Wealthy conservative folks simply paid to elect obedient politicians to ignore regulations, create a huge stock market scam called a bubble, and make it more difficult to pass more intelligent gun, banking, and environmental laws, to name a few. Selling tons of freshly printed stocks and making guns can be very profitable industries, thus helping make them politically powerful and helping keep our basically feudal systems in place; money and profits continued
becoming the new modern god. For we liberal democrats, almost certainly life itself will not become safer and more satisfying within such systems unless more people are educated about how to intelligently start making it more democratic. The public good has simply been left out of the feudalistic equation. A few corporations may be run by enlightened CEOs, but most won’t be. How many parents today now live with more daily fear for their children’s lives because of recent deadly school shootings with horribly destructive weapons?
Are such statements really too outrageous, or not outrageous enough? Are you a conservative or a liberal? As we'll see a little later, weak and unhealthful personal and social results of our conservative public schools are the direct result of their teaching model, recently made into educational concrete with the No Child Left Behind law. It’s based on teaching more and more academic facts to most all students, all in the name of academic certitude and student well-roundedness, whatever that means. Now really, how ‘well-rounded’was Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and George Hegel? Does being well-rounded mean everyone should know for a few years what a mixed number is, and how to add, subtract, multiply and divide them; what Shakespeare wrote 400 years ago; what a marvelous job our constitutional Framers did; and how it’s really good not to question and learn what our own government is doing with our own tax monies? Such anti-democratic habits are taught today in the name of well-roundedness largely because they’re part of the conservative book-based educational model. Learning such facts helps keep students meek, unquestioning, and obedient to their teachers and their books, rather than learning how to think and act critically, creatively, and democratically, and how to use their collective power to actually make life better for people!
How many students learn our Framers certainly weren't democrats and had very weak feelings for equal rights? Even Thomas Jefferson did practically nothing to end slavery even though he wrote the fine-sounding Declaration of Independence? With conservative schools controlling what students learn, rather than actively teaching students to intelligently learn what they want to learn, and making them more aware of the nation they live in, it’s become easier for more public tax money to be used to build more and more prisons, missiles, bombs, and guns; the world’s oldest democracy is now the world’s greatest gun-maker! Is that what academic well-roundedness means? Today more and more people are even accepting the idea of constant warfare conservatives keep talking about as natural and normal.
Certainly empire-minded conservatives have been talking that way! It’s profitable, especially for those wealthy folks who keep making those guns and weapons! Are such results the effects of an excellent educational system, or the
effects of conservative feudalistic schools neglecting to teach students what healthy democratic habits feel like? For us Deweyan liberals, then, the basic educational challenge is educating the next generation to make our economic, political, and educational systems more democratic than they found them. That is modern democracy’s basic and on-going challenge. A few years ago a moderate Democratic president told the nation the era of big government is over. For us liberal democrats, the feudalistic era should be over.
Again, are we liberals really being too critical, or not critical enough? Aren't we really expecting too much from our government, financial sector, and our schools? How can we change those too-big-to-change bureaucracies, with their huge and powerful monopolies affecting everyone’s lives? After all, even Plato realized how difficult it was to make any kind of political improvements, even conservative ones. Eventually his solution was to deport everyone over 10 years of age, and then start educating them! For us liberal Deweyans, however, both schools and elections are our 2 most powerful weapons against conservative feudalistic power. With elections more liberal democratic politicians can keep passing more progressive laws, and local liberals can keep converting one conservative neighborhood school at a time, one grade at a time! That to us is intelligent democracy in action!
Some Economic Facts
How many high school students today know how, for decades now, corporations have been shipping more and more manufacturing jobs overseas to cheaper labor markets, thus throwing more and more people out of work, increasing their profits and salaries, and making good-paying jobs more difficult to find? And what’s more, how many of those students know how to intelligently start fighting back against those profit-obsessed results? How many know how important national, state, and local elections are, and how they can help promote the public good by electing more independent and liberal politicians, rather than merely sitting home on election day? How many students know our economic system often rewards those who are willing to openly lie and cheat and even be jailed, as long as they keep making profits for the company? After the Savings and Loan debacle in the 1980s ripped taxpayers off of some $70 billion, over 1,000 business leaders went to jail! How many students today know almost no CEOs have been jailed for creating the worst economic recession in history? How many college students know many university presidents are hired mainly because they know who to keep asking for university donations, rather than make education easier and more meaningful for more students? How many know feudalistic and undemocratic university boards of trustees keep voting themselves outlandish pay raises paid for with increased student fees? How many know student college debt in the US is now about $1 Trillion, and is enslaving them to years of debt payment? Habits of obedience to our feudalistic and undemocratic status quo make such results common and on-going everyday events!
No doubt, a modern-day cynic like Diogenes would be looking for an honorable capitalist or university president. The ancient and medieval conservative quest for philosophic certainty has recently been replaced by a modern conservative quest and obsession for ever more profits and money! Above all else, money! And how many students know such obsessive conservative habits are a sign of moral disease, not health?
For us Deweyan liberals, few young people today have any real useful knowledge about how an excellent democracy, economy, and educational system might work, and worse, how to intelligently help their evolution from feudalistic to democratic. Such important and relevant feelings and knowledge are all but ignored in our conservative schools. Young folks are coming out of our monastery-like conservative public schools almost totally disconnected psychically from what's going on in their own neighborhoods, much less on Wall Street and D.C. They’ve been continually diverted from learning such democratic habits with academic book-work. Is it any wonder more and more people are feeling disgusted, helpless, and dejected about democracy in general? Without having useful knowledge about making our conservative systems more democratic, disgust is a completely natural response! Without such habits it’s either become part of the system or ignore it.
The greedy habits of many rich folks, and their support of undemocratic school systems, in fact keeps students and adults confined to believing their knowledge of trivial facts is really what an excellent’well-rounded’ education is! No doubt, No Child Left Behind’s legal concrete hasn’t helped! For we Deweyan liberals that educational model is certainly less than excellent! For us, liberal educational excellence is knowing how to actively use such facts intelligently to keep increasing the democratic public good! Book-centered conservative educational habits, like docility and obedience, merely leave young folks more vulnerable to being taken advantage of by a wealthy class and a stream of economic scams! For such conservatives, the main challenge is hiring people to keep creating more scams and increasing their wealth! The recent crash of our housing market in 2007 is yet another stressful and frightening result of such habits. Too many people naively believed bankers really wanted to help them, when they mainly wanted to line their own pockets with more money, and get even more taxpayer bailout money by the government! Much has been repaid, but much hasn’t been repaid either.
In the last 40 years, since 1980, it's also become easier for politicians to keep using obscene amounts of tax money to fund our military-industrial complex. As a result, we’ve been fighting war after war after war all in the name of national security, helping increase the wealth of a small upper class, keep reducing taxes on the wealthy and useful economic regulations, increasing our public debt to obscene levels, and thus keep people tied to their jobs and paying off that public debt, much of which goes to those already obscenely wealthy! The educational point is: Our conservative book-dominated public schools are making the intelligent growth of more democratic political and economic systems even more difficult.
The US is now firmly divided into rich and poor classes, and our national government is largely controlled by the conservative and liberal wings of that upper class. If that isn't another result of economic class warfare, then what would be? Recently millions more are facing the probability of becoming homeless, like tens of thousands already are! As history teaches us, no democracy has become excellent with conservative feudalistic, undemocratic public schools, or with politicians depending on wealthy contributors to finance and propagandize their elections! In fact, with the creation of huge fortunes by a few families during the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s, and the help of 2 World Wars and numerous minor ones, our democratic republic has become a more feudalistic aristocracy than anything else! Feudalistic institutions didn’t die, they just kept growing in our modern era! Where is that fact in our public school history books; such books are, in fact, highly censored before they go to print.
That’s the bad news. But it’s not the only news! The good news is the people still have the power to keep educating themselves, focusing their collective power, and keep finding intelligent ways to keep making our economy, our politics, and our neighborhood schools more liberal and democratic, not less. Such schools begin educating the next generation with more intelligent democratic habits and knowledge, and thus help better protect them from dangerous concentrated and feudalistic economic, political, and educational power! That such schools should be built is the main thesis or idea of this book, as well as describing what such schools would look and act like, and how to start building them.
Educational Alternatives
So, what’s the best alternative to our conservative schools? Is it to make pre-school kids better at learning academic trivia, so a small percentage will go to college, or is it to build more liberal schools for everyone? Only people can answer that question for themselves. For we liberal Deweyans, however, the answer’s plain. The more democratic schools are built, the better most everyone will be in the long run. No doubt, many people may feel building such liberal schools will be very difficult, and it would be if parents and teachers tried doing it all at once, in all grades. But it doesn’t have to stay like that. In fact, it’s probably the worst way to build such schools. Better to build them one grade at a time, and one year at a time, starting with 1st grade, and then 1stand 2nd grade and so on. That way, teachers will better know what’s useful for 1st graders and can concentrate on 2nd graders instead, and so on.
No doubt, conservative types will choose to give their kids more pre-school book experience, but again, it’s not the only or best educational alternative open to liberal democrats. For liberals there will be obstacles to overcome; what else is new? In any case, what’s most important is people power; if enough people want them, then liberal schools can be built, or conservative schools can become more liberal. As Section 41 will show us, that’s probably the biggest obstacle of all – popular support and will power. Once that’s achieved, however, then any neighborhood school can start slowly becoming more liberal, and giving parents and children more educational power over what is learned, and how it’s learned!
As we’ve seen, in the early 1900s such liberal democratic schools began growing in many US cities and rural areas, but as the 1900s entered its second half, after Dewey died, the cold war began, and Russia launched Sputnik 1, conservatives in effect declared war on Dewey’s ideas and liberal schools. Any liberal habits are, in fact, a threat to their concentrated and feudalistic power; much of it depends on regimented and obedient students, not independent and democratic ones. With such liberal schools, however, it certainly would have been much more difficult for naïve President Johnson to send over 50,000 young Americans to their death in Vietnam, kill perhaps a million Vietnamese, and injure and cripple tens of thousands more! In fact, for us liberals the whole feudal capitalistic economic model works better with passive people often accepting and doing what they’re told; call NOW! Hurry, hurry, hurry! For conservatives in general, obedience to the status quo is the highest good, so democratic equal rights of any kind threaten their own power, in economics, politics, and education.
The wealthy may send their children to expensive pre-schools, but less wealthy people should know: Building more liberal neighborhood schools is not only an option, but it’s do-able! Why bother? Because they make our democracy even stronger and people more intelligent! Based on better personal and social results in such schools, we say young folks can start learning how to actively and intelligently become their own best therapist and teacher, and what it means to grow healthy intelligent habits. Why shouldn’t they learn to keep intelligently guiding their own growth, and mastering their own weak,
excessive, and unhealthful habits, as well as keep making our still feudalistic institutions more democratic and helpful to all law-abiding people? If not, then we’ll continue seeing people dominating and manipulating others just to take their money, or worse, their lives in more unnecessary wars. After all, most all children go to public schools, so why not teach them such skills before they graduate, so they’re better able to avoid life’s dangers.
Aren't those the kinds of educational questions more people should be asking themselves about the neighborhood schools their own hard-earned taxes pay for, and how they can be improved for everyone's benefit? Why keep believing wealthy folks have all the advantages in life, when in fact they don’t. Why keep believing our elected leaders always know what’s best for us? The fact is, more often than not, they’re more concerned about pleasing the wealthy and powerful, and their place in history. As we’re seeing, in this present serious and deep recession caused by a few powerful under-regulated feudalistic banks and corporations, more teachers are being laid off, and thus making it even more difficult to keep improving our public schools. Is that yet another result conservatives like to see, as well as breaking the power of teacher unions? Shouldn’t more people be asking such questions about those who want to build more non-union charter schools?
Making a Fresh Start
No doubt, more liberal schools can be built! It's basically a question of teaching parents, students, and liberal wealthy folks what they might look like, and then mobilizing their own social power to start experimenting with them at the primary level. Dewey's psychological ideas about habits help build a foundation for such experiments. His liberal educational model for public schools focused on building more intelligent and democratic habits with intelligent experimentation. The truth he saw was simple enough: unless young folks get some active and intelligent experimental training and practice building healthful character habit-arts, life will become more difficult for everyone! After all, it really doesn’t take much to teach students how important and intelligent it is to respect just laws, how to relax and enjoy intelligently building useful social projects, like community gardens and day-care centers, how to intelligently exercise and eat, as well as practice economic and political health. The more such habits aren't taught, the more everyone pays for the often destructive, wasteful, and disrespectful results, like more police, courts, and prisons. Are you actively with such thinking, or still staying passive?
For Dewey all habits and their knowledge are organic human arts; they're something most everyone can build and keep improving, even young folks. Just that one fact alone attacks the entire conservative model of passive learning with books. For us liberals, everyone best learns what they know only with actively intelligent practice! Thus, liberal school students are allowed to become much more active and experimental, rather than passively reading day after day. His own educational experiments showed him children are actively experimental by nature, and so the main challenge was to teach them to experiment intelligently, rather than routinely; with first building an intelligent plan, and then testing it. What’s more, if young folks actively practice such learning, with constructive and socially helpful projects, then their knowledge is not only excellent, but their social sense grows as well! In fact, ignoring those basic facts of child psychology and active learning have helped keep conservative educational ideas and habits in place. High drop-out rates in schools around the country, as well as low test scores, continue telling us it’s not the best educational model.
For Dewey it’s also important to know habits are both liberating and confining! It sounds strange, but it’s true. Habits help liberate young folks from childhood ignorance, but at the same time they confine their feelings to those new habits! For example, if the conservative habit of believing there exists only one real system of Truth, then students become confined by it, as the history of Christianity or any religion keeps showing us. And the more that happens, the more difficult it becomes to build more tolerant democratic organizations, where every law-abiding person deserves their equal rights! Even a philanthropic habit, for example, restricts a person’s selfishness, while a smoking habit restricts a person’s learning more healthful and enjoyable habits. It’s just basic Behavioral psychology.
Thus, like all other creatures, humans too are both liberated and limited by the habits they practice. It’s what makes early education so important. Book-learning habits, for example, limit students from learning, knowing, and building more intelligent character habits. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, for example, built a conservative thinking habit about slavery, thus limiting their liberal humane feelings for democratic equal rights from growing.
So, for us liberals, life’s basic educational challenge is to start teaching intelligent liberal habits as soon as possible in our public primary schools, and thus help produce more satisfying and enjoyable personal and social results for everyone. Such habits aren't about knowing eternal and unchanging kinds of Truth, and thus trying to dominate others with them, but rather helping students to intelligently learn to share the rights they have with others while learning what they want to learn. Thus they become more independent, civilized, tolerant, and intelligent democratic adults. We Deweyan liberals say that educational goal is best accomplished with the active intelligent practice of experimental learning. That liberal idea is at the core of this educational model.
Overcoming Our Conservative Habits of Obedience
For about the last 5,000 years a basic educational challenge has increased as towns and cities grew, and small feudalistic systems of power evolved. Those in power needed to learn how to keep such power, so the need for schools increased. However, with the recent evolution of modern Behavioral psychology, and knowing people learn only what they actively practice, we today have a better psychological foundation for teaching students how to keep intelligently expanding and improving their knowledge all through life, rather than merely remaining obedient to those with more social power. With the growth of that experimental learning psychology, and its learning techniques of rewarding good actions, we now have more intelligent ways for teaching more liberal tolerant and democratic habits and ideas to the next generation. With such habits they can then keep experimentally learning how to keep improving themselves and their democracy. With the very important learning habit-art of intelligent experimentation, not only excessive and unhealthful food, alcohol, drug, and smoking habits can be more easily improved, but also our own
feudalistic political, economic, and educational systems can be made more democratic as well, and thus made to work for the common good, rather than for the confined personal good of a small wealthy upper class.
That's basically today’s liberal educational challenge; we’re all part of the same species, have the same needs, and thus should have the same rights as anyone else. The bad news is our history of education teaches us conservative schools have continued working against teaching such democratic habit-arts, focusing instead on teaching students to blindly obey teachers who are now required by law to make most all students learn routine and trivial academic book-facts. When’s the last time you talked about Shakespeare in daily life? As a result, keeping feudal, accepting, war-like, and passive habits in place has become easier. Phrases like perpetual warfare, for example, have lately become much more common for politicians, thus making it easier for weapons makers to keep taking billions more of the public’s tax money and keep people more fearful and stressful than necessary.
Today, it’s most important to know the conservative-liberal battle for more democracy is far from over; in fact in many ways it's just beginning. Millions of people around the world are now seeing more liberal democratic schools not only can be built, but are the best way to keep all democratic improvements in place and working! What’s more, people can start building them at the local level; they’re improvements possible now, not 5 or 10 years later. In them students learn how to keep intelligently guiding their own and democracy’s growth with active intelligent experimentation! In them more intelligent and democratic personal and social habits are actively learned, not just redd about. (my spelling for the past tense of read) In them students keep expanding and improving their own weak, excessive, and unhealthful habit-limits, as well as keep working to make all forms of local concentrated feudalistic power more democratic. Local corporations may better help and feed more people, but why shouldn’t they too be run more democratically, so everyone loses during recessions, instead of just the workers?
As we’ll see throughout these pages, there's a whole set of excellent, constructive, and positive habits possible for young folks to learn, helping make life more healthful and more respectful of people and just laws. Moreover, when actively learned with intelligent practice, such liberal habits encourage students to keep asking more intelligent questions about what's going on both politically and economically in their own neighborhoods. And the more that happens, the easier it becomes to intelligently help those less well off, and learn what intelligent kindness, sympathy, and democratic equal rights actually feel like. It’s one thing to merely read about them, but when actively practiced such knowledge becomes more deeply felt.
Without knowing how active intelligent experimental learning best keeps expanding our always limited habits, both people and their nation remain confined to old ancient and feudalistic and medieval systems of power, and their production of more dangerous, undemocratic, stressful, and unhealthful results. Feudalistic societies cared more for the ruling good, and little for the public good. Just recently, as people meekly accepted 2 unnecessary and brutal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, taxpayer debt has become obscenely oppressive, while a small conservative wealthy class and politicians continued saying the government must stop helping people find jobs while allowing very profitable corporations to put their profits in tax-free offshore banks! Thus our public debt remains artificially high for everyone! Such are some results of our feudalistic national government, and they’re the kinds of actions liberal democratic schools teach students to actively end. What moral right has any organization to neglect equal rights and the public good?
Another Liberal Idea: Character Training
Character training is another very important practice in liberal schools. Children of our small primitive nomadic hunting and gathering ancestors of the past 2 million years didn't need such training. Every character habit they learned for survival was learned actively, with encouraging practice from adults. However, as agricultural habits grew and people began building villages, towns, cities, and ruling classes, new and different educational needs grew. Such
rulers needed to teach people how and why they should support them, and so different religious systems evolved to help build such conservative character habits, helping justify a feudalistic social status quo. Small governing priest and ruling classes, for example, needed to convince farmers they should be supported, and so all kinds of myths were created. Some said such rulers and their rituals actually postpone the end of world, while others said they also protect their people.
And, along with such myths, rulers also needed to know how much food to take from farmers so they wouldn't have to grow their own; mathematics and surveying thus became important subjects to learn. Records were also kept of how much was grown, and who paid what, thus creating the educational need for scribes to learn writing, calculating, and measuring skills; the ancient Egyptians soon became very good as teaching such knowledge and skills to a small group of young men, and accepting character habits to most everyone else. The first conservative feudalistic schools thus taught very practical kinds of knowledge, but only to a very small class of students. For most everyone else, learning the skills and character habits necessary for living still rested on actively practicing them, usually within one's family and social kin group.
Such obedient and accepting habits all helped support feudalistic social systems. Character habits like obeying the laws, fair business practices, and being polite and respectful to one's neighbors and foreigners became more important to learn. In Babylon, for example, such laws were written and displayed publicly around 2,000 BCE. And so, people could read about what character habits they needed, especially passive obedience to a feudal social structure, as well as how to treat slaves, women, children, rulers, and priests. Class-based city-living thus called for obedience to such habit-arts, like not even looking at one's ruler.
At the same time, no doubt, many also began realizing there’s a big difference in results produced by constructive, helpful, and kind habits, and those produced by destructive, mean, unkind, and war-like habits. Eventually ancient Greeks like Democritus, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle began creating different models of character excellence, liberals emphasizing liberal democratic and questioning habits, while conservatives and moderates emphasizing obedience to old feudalistic ones. For liberals like Democritus, for example, it seemed clear: educational excellence taught all young folks not only how to keep intelligently expanding their own confining habits, and also character habits useful for building a more humane and democratic society. Thus different forms of character became more clearly defined and described. Christianity’s founder Paul of Tarsus summarized a conservative idea: Slaves, be obedient to you masters.
Why mention such facts? Simply because many people today don’t realize different educational models exist, and how important different character habits are to we liberals! As a result, many people today don't realize different kinds of character habits exist, and they can be formally taught in our schools! Blindly obeying their teachers and passively learning more and more book-facts builds character habits making democracy and equal rights even more difficult to produce! In fact, for us Deweyan liberals, the lack of formal liberal democratic character habits and training has become a major weakness in our conservative public schools; they grow when most all students are made to learn the same set of trivial academic facts. As we’ve seen, however, the wasteful and stressful personal and social results of that kind of character training keeps wasting much of our precious educational tax monies, leaves young folks unprepared for life in the modern world, and almost forces us to keep building more prisons and hospitals. Liberal schools aim to improve those results with both character and health studies in our neighborhood public schools.
Without learning more liberal character and health habits, it’s much easier for young folks to disrespect our just laws, build unhealthful and excessive diet habits, and thus increase the need for more prisons and hospitals. Also, without teaching such character habits, more people need to rely on more government health and penal programs to reduce their harmful and dangerous social results, like increased crime and disease. We liberals say such weak and unhealthful social results are helped when our conservative schools, homes, and churches continue teaching mainly academic facts; in such schools children are practically passively enslaved to their books, thus creating weak character habits in too many young folks.
If so, then our own conservative schools continue making life unnecessarily stressful and dangerous, as well as confining the next generation to feudalistic habits of obedience to the social, economic, and political status quo. To us liberals, such results are completely unacceptable; they are not the habits a healthy and intelligent democracy needs for making a more peaceful and cooperative world. We say more people should know, many people continue making taxpayer money from such weak character habits, like police, judges, and prison guards, as well as doctors and lawyers. With the help of our politicians, and of course many of their conservative contributors, our schools have remained much too conservative in practice for at least the last 50 years, teaching mainly obedience to teachers offering more and more academic book-facts, like when the dinosaurs lived, patriotic stories about our own history, and useless mathematical skills like how to solve quadratic equations. For those interested in reading more about our educational weaknesses John Holt’s books are useful, as is Dewey's Democracy and Education. This book too will keep suggesting more ways our schools can start building much more useful democratic character habits.
The Media: More Educational Tools
Thanks to modern science, schools aren’t the only educational tools we liberals have. Some of our popular media offers more information for making our nation more democratic and satisfying for all. Even though many are now owned by conservatives focused mostly on making more money and convincing the public conservatives have the best ideas, other more liberal media outlets are telling a different picture of what’s going on out there. However conservative much of it may be for better educating people about the real results of conservative ideas, some TV, newspapers, and the Internet continue informing people with a more liberal picture. With some of the more liberal outlets, like public TV and liberal online sources like The Nation, Truthdig.com, and Mother Jones.com, it's become much easier to help people keep learning about the results our feudalistic economic, political, and educational systems are producing, and equally important, what kinds of active protests and actions are possible.
With such outlets our own liberal history is seen more clearly. For example, early in the 1900s liberal newspapers helped grow a very strong and vibrant progressive political and educational movement; Dewey’s writings helped as well. In fact it continues growing today in many places around the world; there’s a healthy progressive congressional minority as well as an electorate. After all, the more people elect more liberal politicians, labor leaders, and school boards like they did in the 1930s, the more they focused on the public good and the more democratic life became. Thanks to such liberal media outlets our conservative feudalistic world has changed much since Plato's day, and democracy is blooming and growing as never before, making it much easier to keep growing liberal reform movements on the most important level of all -- on the local neighborhood level! If the conservative-liberal ratio in ancient Greece was 90% to 10%, then today’s ration may be 60% to 40%. But as we’ve seen, stressful conservative results are still too dangerous for millions of people, and so our liberal work building more democratic institutions is far from done, especially building more liberal schools. That’s where such educational reforms and improvements can most easily be controlled and grown of, by, and for the people.
True, our popular media could be helping that process more, but in many ways their increasing number of conservative corporate sponsors prevents that from happening. How many TV-owning-network corporations like General Electric, who make billions building more bombs and weapons, put conservative politicians on TV talk shows telling people we need more bombs and weapons, paid for, of course, by taxpayers? And, how many conservative-owned TV stations put more trivial high-interest shows on the air merely for more profits? After all, the more people are entertained, the easier it is to sell them more corporate goods, like cars, cosmetics, and even a war. Recently a show about one very conservative billionaire Koch brother was stopped from airing; too many people might learn too much about the conservative agenda, and how some people keep using their wealth to make it work.
Thus, with conservative media control, it becomes easier to keep their feudalistic social systems in place, even though they often help with disaster relief and important subjects like equal sexual rights. But the question can be asked: why not use our public airwaves to also teach socially useful and helpful character habits too, like respecting just laws? True, TV can only show people what character excellence looks like; it can’t actually teach what they feel like, like our public schools can with active experimentation! But even mentioning would be a help.
No doubt, many of our daily network TV shows are helping more people learn about healthful and unhealthful habits and actions. But, without actively teaching such ideas like respect and how to intelligently help others, such ideas remain just that, mere ideas. How much do such dramatic soap operas actually help build a more democratic republic? Shouldn’t students be free to watch useful shows about, say, basic Behavioral psychology; shows about how money works in today’s world; intelligent child-rearing practices, and healthy food shows too? After all, public TV is funded with tax monies, so why aren’t they giving the next generation more useful information about living intelligently in a profit-obsessed economic system? Instead, we continue getting more high interest shows like what someone thinks their antique objects are worth, and how some animals kill other animals! About such shows, how many remain underwhelmed?
More liberal and practical people see such shows as merely diverting attention from teaching people what’s important to know for making life more democratic and less feudalistic. For example, how do wealthy folks use money to convince politicians to vote their way, and how a 2 tier stock market of the rich and everyone makes it easy to keep taking peoples’money? How much insider trading is there on Wall Street, and how do the very wealthy keep getting wealthier? Isn’t such knowledge really the first step to taking a more intelligent control of our lives? Personally, I’ve also given up on watching royal coronations, royal marriages, and pope funerals and elections; I’m all poped-out, so to speak! Better liberal schools are one antidote to such public-funded kinds of uselessness. They can be used best
to help students understand how our system works, and how to make it more democratic and equal for everyone.
The more young folks are distracted from learning more about what’s going on out there, the more difficult it becomes to keep improving it. What's often left out of network news stories is seeing how people can themselves intelligently start experimenting to produce more democratic and constructive results with their actions. Often people are simply
directed to people who can help, often for a price.
More Useful Liberal Subjects
We Deweyan liberals say the main focus of education needs to change if people and our nation is to keep becoming healthier and more democratic. For us more useful subjects can be taught in our public schools, rather than teaching an array of disconnected and shallow book-facts. Such liberal schools can focus on teaching 4 useful kinds of intelligent health, and teaching them actively and experimentally, in addition to allowing students more freedom to study what they want to study. Thus liberal schools can aim at building intelligent habits of physical, psychological, economic, and political health. Otherwise the small number of wealthy people who run our still largely feudal systems will continue exploiting anyone they can to keep increasing their own economic and political power, instead of increasing the public good. How easy is it for, say, doctors to keep taking advantage of people who are health-ignorant, and thus keep healthcare costs artificially high? Isn’t that basically why government health programs are so expensive?
In liberal schools intelligently learning more about those 4 healthy habits before they graduate and begin their adult careers can become most important. Whatever they choose to learn about, whether it’s clothing, food service, banking, doctoring, or lawyering, students can also start learning some basics about those 4 kinds of health. For example, how to actively practice intelligent eating and exercise habits; how to practice psychological health by enjoying work, talking positively, and with some humor! Psychological health also means practicing ethically excellent habits, like helping those less well off, and what it means in action to respect others and just laws. They’ll learn more about Behavioral psychology like intelligently using enjoyable rewards to make learning a new habit feel comfortable. They’ll also begin learning about economic kinds of health, like working not only for their own well-being, but also the public good; and also democratic health, like how to keep building more democratic neighborhood political systems to better work for the public good, rather than for just a small number of people. Such knowledge is useful throughout life, to keep building better character habits, and also for making our nation more democratic and sharing, rather than feudalistic and greedy. Can education get any more well-rounded than that?
With sciences like Behavioral psychology and intelligent experimental learning, even young grade-school students can begin learning about what excellent liberal character habit-arts to grow, and how to enjoy building them as well. If intelligent habits are the only way anyone becomes more intelligent, then why not learn to enjoy building them? Learning to use rewards intelligently in that process is very useful information. That habit-art in itself would be a great educational improvement to any school. After all, we all live with our confining habits all through life, so why not learn how to intelligentlykeep expanding those we want to learn more about, like excellent economic and political habits? No matter what business a child wants to go into, there are economic and political factors. So, the more they know about them, the easier and less stressful life itself becomes, and the less need there'll be to depend on government kinds of help for teaching young folks what they could and should have learned in school! To us Deweyan liberals such habits are most important.
Building a healthful diet is one example; it’s a sign of physical health. It’s one thing to merely read about the dangerous results of addictive overeating and obesity, but they’re merely ideas, without the feelings necessary for true wisdom and knowledge. However, with an active, intelligent, and enjoyable experimental learning habit, helping students actually grow, cook, and eat healthy food, students can actually start turning mere ideas and cold facts into deep and propulsive feelings and habits; into will power itself! After all, it takes everyone years to build bad diet habits, so why shouldn’t it take years to learn better ones, while also learning what results corporate-made junk food might be producing in their bodies?
In short, the best way to start improving bad eating habits is with more enjoyable healthful actions, and learning such habit-arts is what liberal schools are all about. The lack of such active, enjoyable, and intelligent practice in our conservative schools is, to us liberal Deweyans, our greatest educational weakness in them. Such schools too can be built with a little intelligent and enjoyable baby-step experimentation, one small step at a time.
Almost daily as I shop for food, I’m amazed at how much dietary junk there is for sale; so much of it is sugar, fat, and salt laden. How many prostate problems are caused by white sugar alone? A Deweyan liberal model of education simply asks, why not teach young folks healthful physical, psychological, economic, and political habits, so they can become more intelligent people? Isn’t that a much better definition of academic well-roundedness than merely having a head full of academic trivia? Don’t rising obesity and disease-related health problems tell us such schools are needed now more than ever before?
What’s more, with such active studies whole new fields of useful academic facts begin opening up, like primate evolution, human biology, and chemistry as well! Why put all those hard-to-pronounce chemicals into foods, and what the hell are they doing in our bodies? Students who know how to enjoy practicing experimentally intelligent learning know how to keep asking intelligent questions, and thus keep guiding and improving their own healthy habits, become their own learning masters, and so feel much more independent and confident to keep learning what they want to learn all through life. In today's rapidly changing world, where the continual hunt for more profits remains a kind of economic god, the excellent habit of self-education is, perhaps, the most important skill to have. Colleges are becomes too expensive for many students, and so self-education becomes a very useful habit. And with good Behavioral habits such students will know how to enjoy learning new skills and knowledge, and how to control their own weak, excessive, and unhealthful actions even after they're out of school. Or would we rather keep student habits and knowledge confined to reading about more academic facts and keep adult life both physically and psychically weak and stunted? As we know now, nature has given most everyone the mental tools to learn such healthfully propulsive habit-arts; no one is a slave by nature! For us Deweyan liberals, then, the educational challenge is to actually start teaching those habit-arts one grade at a time, one year at a time. What 1st grader can’t learn to say intelligent experimentation is the best way to learn?
After all, it’s either that, or keep students sitting passively at their desks year after year while greedy conservatives keep creating more and more ways to keep taking more of the public’s money. In the 1920s, for example, most everyone believed their stocks would never go down in value! Those kinds of naïve and unrealistic ideas celebrated by conservative politicians merely made it easier for exploitative feudalistic stock markets to continue taking more money until it collapsed in 1929. And because our military-supporting corporations remain good at the art of taking the public’s money to build more weapons, war itself remains an unintelligent option in every generation. Have you noticed yet the similarity between classroom rows and seats and military marching formations? I certainly have. For all practical purposes they’re the same. No doubt, sometimes we need soldiers, but to regiment everyone, men and women alike, and keep teaching them habits of obedience only makes it easier for all kinds of obedience to continue on, especially economic and political obedience.
Every democratic republic needs such liberal schools, or else they’ll remain basically feudalistic societies. Please think about this. About 2 million able-bodied young folks are now wasting their time and tax-payer money in our prisons, many of whom keep returning to prison time and time again. That fact alone should make people think more about making their own neighborhood public schools better at teaching useful intelligent character habits, like how to make an honest living, help those less well off, and how to make our own neighborhoods more satisfying for everyone! After all, if a child learns how to intelligently build just one excellent healthful habit-art, like diet, exercise, or even auto or computer repair, then such knowledge will more easily affect all the child’s learning; that’s how organic and interrelated life is. As the great film maker Woody Allen poetically said, you need to build your own survival kit! Such kits are composed of a person’s own character habits.
In short, then, liberal educational excellence is about teaching young folks how to use academic facts when they’re needed, like for their own or the public good, not merely when the teacher says learn them. Such liberal schools help build student independence, confidence, and intelligence, and best of all, they put academic book facts in their place, as merely tools for building a better world, not for merely learning more and more of them. In a very real sense such healthy habits increase student chances not only for survival, but for a more satisfying life for everyone. Every time a student or a prisoner is treated as an individual, with their own personal learning needs and wants, the dawn of modern education and prison reform becomes brighter. To be sure, however, liberal Deweyan schools or prisons aren’t about simply letting children learn only what they want; for Dewey that educational indulgence! It helps waste real human potential. Liberal schools should be about teaching students how to intelligently make themselves and their neighborhoods as excellent as they want to be. We are social creatures, so why not learn how to be socially intelligent? That is the most intelligent weapon against any feudalistic system.
The Road Ahead
With such introductory remarks we can more clearly begin seeing some of our challenges and obstacles, as well as some useful tools for overcoming them. Such liberal ideas will also make it easier for the reader to walk over the educational road ahead. The basic goal of this book is to give parents and students some useful knowledge about Dewey’s liberal educational options, so they can begin using them at home, compare them to what’s going on in their own neighborhood schools, and perhaps even start experimenting to improve them with more liberal ideas and habits.
The basic plan is this: First, sections 2-4 will give some information about conservative, moderate, and liberal educational models. The less students and parents know about them, the more conservative schools will stay in place. With a little educational history people can easily begin seeing a few fundamentally important differences between those models. Moreover, such differences are simple to state and understand. Like never before, modern democracy is blooming around the world, and so millions of people are now challenged to make them true and lasting democracies, and here at home to keep lessening the power of our own feudalistic systems. For all such challenges, all schools become tremendously important! The more the next generation is educated to practice liberal kinds of democratic health, the stronger democracy becomes. That’s the great educational challenge facing people around the world today, even in the US! Even here, democratic equal rights are still not a solid and on-going reality, much less economic and educational equality.
No doubt, conservatives and moderates will keep working against building such power-sharing schools, governments, and corporations; many of them feel the Truth has already been discovered, and so our schools should teach only their model of it. But in our new modern age of science, where intelligent experimental learning now produces our strongest knowledge, all such conservative book-centered models can be confidently challenged wherever they’re found; the only habit best conserved in an always changing nature is the habit-art of intelligent experimentation! The more students are actively taught to feel that liberal idea and how it works, the easier it becomes to keep building more flexible and stable democratic schools, corporations, and political systems. It's our new modern educational challenge, just like beginning to live in towns and cities challenged our ancient and medieval ancestors to build schools themselves.
A brief glance at educational history in those sections will help us see such challenges haven’t yet been answered as well as they could be. And they won’t be without more liberal schools educating students to actually practice democratic equal rights in all our institutions -- economic, political, and educational. Why shouldn’t workers, for example, have equal power to help guide their corporations and thus better preserve their jobs and salaries? Without such equal power they too may go to work one day and see their jobs have vanished while their leaders made millions selling stock to their workers, as happened at the Enron corporation!
Then, after that educational history, we’ll look at more weaknesses in our conservative book-centered schools, and also begin seeing how they can be improved with building more liberal schools in sections 5-13. The idea of teaching children useful character habits, in addition to knowledge and skills, is one such idea. In fact, we all pay a high social and economic price when all three skills aren't formally taught.
Then from there we’ll describe more about character excellence in sections 13-19, and how children can be taught to experimentally use their book-facts to actually make life a little better, both in and outside of school. After that, in sections 20-24, more will be said about liberal kinds of ideas, like enjoyable learning, tool use, and the general aim of health itself. Naturally, with such information we’ll be criticizing the conservative and moderate educational models practiced for most of the past 5,000 years! To us they merely represent the ways conservatives have kept their economic, educational, and political power. What’s more, people no longer need support such feudal and undemocratic systems and the obnoxious and destructive results they often produce, for both students and adults.
We’ll see what most deserves criticism are conservative schools teaching mainly academic facts, rather than teaching how their knowledge, skills, and character habits can be used to keep improving any local, state, and national social and political system. We are now living in a very interactive and connected world, so why keep students from learning more about what’s going on out there, and instead keep them passively learning the same academic book-facts and trivia, year after year after year? Is that really educational excellence? To us Deweyan liberals it’s essentially a feudal model practiced extensively during the Middle Ages; today, however, in conservative public schools trivial academic facts have replaced religious ideas as the educational god.
Then in Section 25 we’ll see how such conservative schools rest on a false faulty psychology and learning model, both built in the ancient world by Plato and Aristotle. Section 26 will then compare conservative and liberal models of teaching, the first being basically passive, and the second being more active and experimental, as will sections 27-34. Then in sections 35-40 more will be said about liberal educational options, called here Reality Schools, after which Section 41 will talk more about actually building such schools, and Section 42 offering a brief summary of Dewey’s liberal philosophic ideas.
Now, more than ever before, such schools needed. Economic and political life has changed much in the past 40 years, since 1980. As millions have learned in the last few years, a newly deregulated financial sector has in fact endangered the homes and lives of many millions of people both here and around the world! In economically wrecked Greece, many more young folks are turning to drugs and prostitution just for food money! Big banks convinced millions of people to invest in a home, even if they couldn’t make their mortgage payments. As a result, many have lost their homes and savings as well. Thus economics has become a much more useful study for everyone; making and keeping gross profits has become the new secular god, so many need to know more about it to make their actions more intelligent.
Also, obscene amounts of wealth for a few have made it easier for politicians to be influenced and even bought outright; the US has more billionaires than anyone, over 600 and counting. Thus, political and democratic health has become much more important for people to know about as we continue digging out from high amounts of joblessness, both personal and social debt, and economic chaos, made even tougher by conservative politicians not helping create jobs so debts can be reduced! Improving such results have definitely become major challenges for all students and parents.
Character training is another very important practice in liberal schools. Children of our small primitive nomadic hunting and gathering ancestors of the past 2 million years didn't need such training. Every character habit they learned for survival was learned actively, with encouraging practice from adults. However, as agricultural habits grew and people began building villages, towns, cities, and ruling classes, new and different educational needs grew. Such rulers needed to teach people how and why they should support them, and so different religious systems evolved to help build such conservative character habits, helping justify a feudalistic social status quo. Small governing priest and ruling classes, for example, needed to convince farmers they should be supported, and so all kinds of myths were created. Some said such rulers and their rituals actually postpone the end of world, while others said they also protect their people. And, along with such myths, rulers also needed to know how much food to take from farmers so they wouldn't have to grow their own; mathematics and surveying thus became important subjects to learn. Records were also kept of how much was grown, and who paid what, thus creating the educational need for scribes to learn writing, calculating, and measuring skills; the ancient Egyptians soon became very good as teaching such knowledge and skills to a small group of young men, and accepting character habits to most everyone else. The first conservative feudalistic schools thus taught very practical kinds of knowledge, but only to a very small class of students. For most everyone else, learning the skills and character habits necessary for living still rested on actively practicing them, usually within one's family and social kin group.
Such obedient and accepting habits all helped support feudalistic social systems. Character habits like obeying the laws, fair business practices, and being polite and respectful to one's neighbors and foreigners became more important to learn. In Babylon, for example, such laws were written and displayed publicly around 2,000 BCE. And so, people could read about what character habits they needed, especially passive obedience to a feudal social structure, as well as how to treat slaves, women, children, rulers, and priests. Class-based city-living thus called for obedience to such habit-arts, like not even looking at one's ruler.
At the same time, no doubt, many also began realizing there’s a big difference in results produced by constructive, helpful, and kind habits, and those produced by destructive, mean, unkind, and war-like habits. Eventually ancient Greeks like Democritus, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle began creating different models of character excellence, liberals emphasizing liberal democratic and questioning habits, while conservatives and moderates emphasizing obedience to old feudalistic ones. For liberals like Democritus, for example, it seemed clear: educational excellence taught all young folks not only how to keep intelligently expanding their own confining habits, and also character habits useful for building a more humane and democratic society. Thus different forms of character became more clearly defined and described. Christianity’s founder Paul of Tarsus summarized a conservative idea: Slaves, be obedient to you masters.
Why mention such facts? Simply because many people today don’t realize different educational models exist, and how important different character habits are to we liberals! As a result, many people today don't realize different kinds of character habits exist, and they can be formally taught in our schools! Blindly obeying their teachers and passively learning more and more book-facts builds character habits making democracy and equal rights even more difficult to produce! In fact, for us Deweyan liberals, the lack of formal liberal democratic character habits and training has become a major weakness in our conservative public schools; they grow when most all students are made to learn the same set of trivial academic facts. As we’ve seen, however, the wasteful and stressful personal and social results of that kind of character training keeps wasting much of our precious educational tax monies, leaves young folks unprepared for life in the modern world, and almost forces us to keep building more prisons and hospitals. Liberal schools aim to improve those results with both character and health studies in our neighborhood public schools.
Without learning more liberal character and health habits, it’s much easier for young folks to disrespect our just laws, build unhealthful and excessive diet habits, and thus increase the need for more prisons and hospitals. Also, without teaching such character habits, more people need to rely on more government health and penal programs to reduce their harmful and dangerous social results, like increased crime and disease. We liberals say such weak and unhealthful social results are helped when our conservative schools, homes, and churches continue teaching mainly academic facts; in such schools children are practically passively enslaved to their books, thus creating weak character habits in too many young folks.
If so, then our own conservative schools continue making life unnecessarily stressful and dangerous, as well as confining the next generation to feudalistic habits of obedience to the social, economic, and political status quo. To us liberals, such results are completely unacceptable; they are not the habits a healthy and intelligent democracy needs for making a more peaceful and cooperative world. We say more people should know, many people continue making taxpayer money from such weak character habits, like police, judges, and prison guards, as well as doctors and lawyers. With the help of our politicians, and of course many of their conservative contributors, our schools have remained much too conservative in practice for at least the last 50 years, teaching mainly obedience to teachers offering more and more academic book-facts, like when the dinosaurs lived, patriotic stories about our own history, and useless mathematical skills like how to solve quadratic equations. For those interested in reading more about our educational weaknesses John Holt’s books are useful, as is Dewey's Democracy and Education. This book too will keep suggesting more ways our schools can start building much more useful democratic character habits.
Also, obscene amounts of wealth for a few have made it easier for politicians to be influenced and even bought outright; the US has more billionaires than anyone, over 600 and counting. Thus, political and democratic health has become much more important for people to know about as we continue digging out from high amounts of joblessness, both personal and social debt, and economic chaos, made even tougher by conservative politicians not helping create jobs so debts can be reduced! Improving such results have definitely become major challenges for all students and parents.
2. EDUCATION HIGHLIGHTS: ANCIENT
In this and the next 3 sections we go into a little of education's history, and see why a conservative book-centered idea model has remained so powerful in Western public schools, even in our present Age of Experimental Science. Some habits do indeed die hard. For us liberals the reason is rather simple: not enough people today know about other educational models, especially Dewey’s liberal democratic one! In truth, Western civilization has been growing for about 5 thousand years, and all through that time not only have book-factsbeen the most important ideas to teach students, but educating only a small class of aristocratic males was dominant too! Most everyone else learned the family trade and so had no idea there were conservative, moderate, and liberal models of both life and nature; only in ancient Greece did such models evolve, and conservatives all but killed any other model. Through it all, however, one fact has remained constant: people needed to be educated about democracy and a more liberal feeling of human equality for a more liberal educational model to be built at all! In short, only with education’s help with democracy continue growing or withering.
Liberal Models
Often for those wealthier students who had individual
tutors, such academic facts and ideas were also made to feel like the eternal
and unchanging Truth about life and nature. Even after liberal philosophic models
were built by Atomists like Democritus, and humanist sophists like Protagoras,
conservatives and moderates like Plato and Aristotle soon attacked such
democratic models as not capable of teaching such Truth.
And they then build philosophic models of human nature to help justify
their own ideas of educational excellence. For such people, conservative ideas and
habits were the best knowledge and wisdom from past ancestors, and they were
felt to be the best knowledge to know.
In fact, many religious people throughout the world still study the ideas
of their forefathers, often assuming some of their ideas were divinely inspired;
in that way they too helped justify the status quo habits they were taught. In ancient Greece even the gods were
restricted by nature's fate.
Beginning in the 500s BCE, liberal and secular Western
science and philosophy began blooming; both would eventually help create liberal
democratic models of educational excellence. Perhaps the 2 greatest such thinkers
were Democritus the Atomist (c460 - c370 BCE) and Protagoras the Sophist (c490 –
c420 BCE). They laid the liberal foundation not only for modern science and Humanism, but also for Dewey's
liberal philosophic models. For both of them educational excellence was practical, experimentally active, and naturalistic, rather than contemplative, quiet, and spirit-oriented. So, even at its founding, the liberal education model aimed at making everyone's habits stronger and more useful.
Protagoras, for example, traveled from city to city and
taught anyone who wanted more useful knowledge for living in a democratic
society to strengthen their weak speaking and thinking skills, making them
clearer and more logical. That way they could participate intelligently not only in better running their cities,
but also better at defending themselves in court! For him knowledge was always growing and changing, like nature itself, and so our senses were most important for helping people see and feel how their
own habits could be improved for the better. Unlike Plato, such liberals simply
trusted what their senses were telling them about nature:
we had no objective evidence eternal and unchanging objects
existed, and so natural movements were the best objects of knowledge, especially
political and educational ones. Again, it was practical knowledge; without their senses showing people
what was actually happening in the natural world, people would more easily be
controlled by the powerful and conservative wealthy and religious upper
classes.
In short, such active and experimental liberal models of
educational excellence were designed to make young folks less vulnerable to
being dominated by conservatives. Their main goal was maintaining the same status quo social classes, where
everyone knew their place and stayed in them, even rulers. Just like today, many conservatives then worked only for that result, and as a rule ignored the public good together; for them slavery too was completely
natural. For ancient liberal democratic humanists and pragmatists, however, life could become much better for
everyone, not just the wealthy and powerful. So, liberals celebrated teaching useful and practical kinds of character skills and habits like equality, as well as knowledge and ideas; the results of such knowledge could be tested with the senses for their worthiness and reliability to make life better
for everyone! The conservative assumption about there being some objects producing eternal and
unchanging Truth might make some people feel good, especially those with
religious habits, but for more liberal folks such ideas could not be experimentally tested, and thus remained merely personal assumptions. One either accepted them or didn’t, depending mostly on the way one was educated and how one's parents behaved.
Democritus built an atomic model of nature helping justify
such ideas. It encouraged people to keep focusing on all the natural events going on around them.
Atoms composed all the objects we see around us, like plants, animals, people, and celestial objects.
They all rest on nature’s ever-changing atomic movements, and so knowledge too was ever-changing.
Thus liberal Greek science resulted in urging people to know how to control natural kinds of movements; such regularities were often thought of as laws of nature; a vague natural force like fate gave them their power. For Democritus, then, discovering such laws with the help of one's senses and reason became the highest kind of
knowledge. The senses may sometimes deceive us, but reason can correct such deceptions.
And around the same time liberal doctors like Hippocrates realized such
learning tools could even help cure diseases, build a more healthful world, and
thus make life more satisfying and rewarding for everyone, not just a small wealthy upper class.
How could Democritus be sure atoms really existed if they
couldn't be seen? No one knows for
sure, but we can certain make educated guesses. No doubt he knew we have more senses
than our eyes; his odor-detecting nose also helped convince him unseen objects
exist, or else they couldn't be smelled.
If so, a rather humorous question can be asked:
does the atomic theory also rest on the existence of farts?
In any case, all our senses were useful in any learning project; the
all-important results of our actions can only be senses and felt.
Thus students should use their senses and feelings to help them build
practical and useful habit-arts with intelligent experimental
trial-and-error. So, even ancient
liberal educational excellence became focused on events here and
now, and working to make them produce more satisfying results for everyone.
Secular humanist Protagoras, on the other hand, wasn't
quite so science-oriented. For him intelligent speaking and reasoning habits were the most important useful skills for educational and character excellence!
They were what people needed most to maintain a democratic
city-state. He thus focused on teaching speaking and debating habits to anyone who could afford his lectures,
and even sometimes those who couldn't.
For wise sophists like him, educational excellence focused on learning
useful skills like legal and political debate; they were the closest thing to an
educational absolute liberal Greek sophists had. To democrats like Democritus and
Protagoras, to ignore their own ethical and political habits was their
version of cardinal sin. How could anyone expect to better control the wealthy and
powerful who always seemed to be wanting more power and control over people, and
passing laws to make it easier?
No doubt, both Democritus and Protagoras celebrated such
liberal democratic skills in the 400s BCE; as a young man Socrates too wanted to
know more about scientific models.
And he too called on his fellow Athenians to keep improving their
psyches, or characters; for him character excellence was the most important
habit-art of all, even though to liberals it was a rather narrow kind of
excellence. Never once do any of
his biographers say he spoke out against slavery. Even so, with his help a
person’s character habits became even more important than scientific knowledge,
like respecting others, just laws, and also defending themselves from invaders.
What's more, while actively learning and practicing such
skills, other excellent habits could also be learned, like experimental learning
doctors like Hippocrates was already practicing in the 400s BCE, as well as
honesty, bravery, useful business skills, knowing what actions could be
dangerous and enjoyable, physical training, and of course music, poetry, and
practical mathematics to name just a few.
Also, for many liberals, character habit-arts like philanthropy helped
the poor and celebrated equal rights; Aristotle too felt philanthropy's
importance. Such useful character habit-arts eventually became part of Dewey's educational model too.
Plato's Conservative Model
Conservatives like Plato simply could not stand by and see
many of their religious ideas go unchallenged. Greek life in general encouraged people
to freely express their thoughts and feelings. Religious feelings were important to
him. No doubt, from an early age he was taught to feel reverence and respect for many religious ideas, and they continued on all through his life. He spent the better part of 50 years trying to answer the liberal
democratic challenge to conservative aristocratic ideas, and justify ideas like
eternal Truth, ethical certainty, and political aristocracy.
With him classical philosophic art itself continues
growing to include its traditional subjects: what are the best models of
nature, knowledge, psychology, ethics, politics, art, and education?
For him political ideas opened the door to all those subjects. As a result, his answers to the question What is excellence in all of them? was based on spirit-Ideas. Only such eternal and unchanging objects were capable of producing absolute Truth, thus enshrining the quest for certainty in conservative Western philosophy. Thus, Western civilization’s 3 different philosophic models answering that question go back to the ancient Greeks.
For conservatives all roads lead to Plato. His, and philosophy's, most famous book, misnamed Republic,
built one of Western civilization’s first conservative models of educational excellence. In it only
a small class of intellectuals were to be educated over many decades to eventually rule their city-state with absolute power, guided by certain and eternal spirit-Ideas. Like conservatives to this day, change in most all its forms, was to be prevented while a religious status quo was to be maintained.
What’s more, in it his state, guardians were to be relieved from both the quest for money and a one-woman relationship. Why so harsh? He realized how difficult learning spirit-Truth was, and so he wanted his
rulers to be as little distracted as possible. Women were to be shared and children
raised communally. Only the lowly artisan business class should soil their hands with money and family; it was
essentially the conservative Spartan model of ruling excellence.
And of course hundreds of years later the Roman Church started out with
some similar ideas. I once wrote to America's most famous conservative, devout Roman Catholic William F. Buckley Jr., asking him what his model of excellent education was, and he said the Republic was basically
it, although he would disagree with communal marriage and child-raising, as well as profit-making for the ruling class.
Obviously, his educational model was created with the help
of conservative philosophic assumptions and definitions about nature
itself. For example, pious and religious-oriented Plato simply assumed there existed eternal and unchanging
spirit-Ideas which somehow participated with our natural world, giving it its
eternally repetitious forms and knowledge, like an aristocratic political model,
and math subjects like arithmetic and geometry. Such knowledge was said to reflect
nature’s highest objects of knowledge, and produced the one and only Truth. For him they were the objects on which all true science must depend for its causes; all natural objects in fact try
imitating or merging with those eternal spirit-Ideas, help regulate nature's
actions, and thus knowing their knowledge should be the best goal of the ruling
guardians. Centuries later conservative Catholic Bishop Augustine of Hippo turned Plato's highest Idea, the
Form of the Good, into the Christian god, and the Christian model of educational
excellence became to know, love, and serve god in this world, and be happy with
him in the next. For Plato all religions are seeking to know nature’s most real and unchanging spirit-objects.
Thus, Plato’s philosophic model helped him build Western
civilization's basic educational model as well. In what way?
Well, such spirit-objects are rational and essentially mathematical in
nature, and so educating his guardian class was reduced, for the most part, to
mere passive and contemplative reasoning about such ideas.
In fact even today such objects are often pictured by many Jews,
Christians, and Muslims as god's eternal ideas or patterns.
They are the models or forms god used to create the universe itself. Such perfect spirit-Ideas were also
naturally arranged in an ascending pyramid-like structure of increasing value
and worth, much like social classes were arranged in life, from the many
worthless slaves and poor people at the bottom to powerful rulers and
philosophers at the top. Such spirit-objects thus explain why those social classes exist in all societies, and
should continue to exist as well! They merely reflect the spirit-realm's own eternal and unchanging
hierarchy. On top of his knowledge pyramid stood the Idea of the Good, sometimes equated with the number 1. In short, contrary to Democritus's model of nature as merely atomic objects, Plato's universe was alive and formed a continuous link to human life, passing through a correctly reasoning mind.
Thus everything has its own eternal natural status quo worth and purpose, even guardians.
Under the god-like Idea of the Good were a number of lesser spirit-Ideas
helping control movements in our natural world; the natural world simply
reflected that spirit-structure. So for Plato, at the top of secular society should be a small priest-like
philosophic guardian class who knew nature's eternal Truth and worked to keep it
in place. After years of study in a carefully arranged system, they became capable of grasping nature's eternal and unchanging spirit-Truth. One such idea was society was composed of 3 eternal classes; under the guardians were soldiers, and under them were artisans, businesspeople, poor folks, and slaves
working to support their rulers. Thus an ancient feudalistic and aristocratic social status quo became
enshrined in Plato’s work, eventually becoming the philosophic foundation for
the feudal Christian model of life and nature. Much of it continues on in our modern
world too, in undemocratic institutions run from the top down by a small group
of unelected people, like in the military, corporations, and even our own
Supreme Court. It's prompted many to frustratingly say, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
At the bottom of nature's pyramid were natural objects and
animals created and born with a little piece of those spirit-Ideas, and above
them were people having a larger reasoning faculty embedded with such knowledge
in their psyches at birth; even the stars had a better knowledge of nature's
highest Idea than people; their movements were eternally regular.
Thus even for the gifted few, reasoning and contemplation became
the only way to really learn nature's Truth, just as conservative
educators today say reasoning with book-based facts is educational
excellence. Mathematics is still an important subject to study just for itself, even though it's mostly separated
from any practical use. Such knowledge is said to strengthen one's reasoning faculty and thus helps children
feel nature’s eternal Truth. The idea remains a part of conservative public education to this day, rather than
learning to use math facts to keep building a more democratic world, both in and outside of school.
Slavery had already been practiced for thousands of years
in Iraq and Egypt, so they too must reflect some kind of eternal
spirit-cause. They are what always destine some people to be slaves, some to be soldiers, and a few men and women to see nature’s Truth and thus become philosophic rulers or guardians. So, as in ancient China as well, most everyone's education ended early in life and they went to their predestined
family work, while only the few aristocratic children continue studying with private tutors.
Thus, Plato’s middle-period conservative educational model in
the Republic answered 3 main challenges: what to teach, how to teach them, and
who should be taught? For him, eternal and unchanging Spirit-Ideas were the most important, and difficult,
objects to know, the basic learning method was a mental contemplation technique,
and so only intellectuals should be educated to rule with a decades long process
of abstract study mixed with some practical experience. Why bother?
Well, such knowledge could then be used to make politics, ethics, and
education absolutely True sciences. They would thus bring people closer to their eternal natures, from slaves
to rulers, rather than allowing them to merely keep satisfying their narrow and
selfish pleasures, and especially keep them from using their democratic power to
govern themselves and even those more educated. Both he and Socrates asked:
How can the masses be allowed to make political decisions when they don’t
first know what the eternal and unchanging political Truth is?
So his Republicpainted such an educational model. It aimed at
answering one general ethical question what is justice, and ended up
being Western civilization's best conservative model of educational excellence.
He called his learning method dialectic reasoning. In fact, examples of it are preserved in his early Socratic dialogues. In them Socrates was pictured as asking supposedly intelligent people for
definitions of different universal ideas, like justice, goodness, friendship and
courage, and then testing their answers by looking at their results.
With that kind of learning method Plato felt future philosophic rulers
would eventually grasp nature’s highest spirit-Idea of the Good.
Obviously, in such a elite theocratic system democracy had
no place; it was seen as something to be avoided almost always; even atheists
and agnostics like Protagoras were to be converted or killed.
Today many conservatives like Admiral Hyman Rickover might call such
eternal and unchanging objects scientific facts, and so they too have remained
the basis of conservative book-centered educational excellence at our military
academies. Thus from Plato to today, conservative education is still tied to
obeying one's teachers while absorbing more and more already-existing
book-facts, and of course obeying orders from one's military leaders.
On the plus side, however, he did allow his philosophic
rulers to learn some practical habit-arts; even then such knowledge was
useful. He recommended they have some 15 years of practical experience in the real world, from 35 to 50, living in the natural world and seeing how it works. Ever since, Western educators have
often emphasized, to differing degrees, those 2 kinds of educational goals --
intellectual knowledge and practical character training! Both are needed to deepen and ripen their wisdom and character. Most probably Plato got this idea from a few different sources. One was military Sparta's educational model; in it books weren’t as good as practice itself; and of course Greek life itself was oriented to practical knowledge. So, in Sparta young folks were trained from childhood to be military soldiers and the bearers of strong children.
Another source for his practical training idea may have
come from one of Socrates' biographers, Xenophon.
He was a general who actually took troops to the Persian Empire and saw
how they educated children to produce 2 results: to teach them useful facts, but also to
build their feudalistic character habits.
So, Plato's educational model in the Republic
celebrated bright students learning about Socratic kinds of eternal Truth
as well as politically useful character habits.
They would be the status quo habits worth preserving.
All through the Middle Ages young priests and nuns were told what
religious ideas to believe, but they also learned practical skills like how to
run the monasteries and nunneries they lived in, and how to care for the old and sick as best they could.
In such ways even today’s conservative
schools are more conservative than Plato suggested.
Today mainly book-facts are still memorized, while practical formal
character training is all but ignored, like scientific gardening and helping the
poor! As a result, young public
school students today are entering their adult years even less prepared for
living in a capitalistic aristocracy than Plato's future philosophic
rulers. Is that bad? Well, the results are often increased amounts of crime, public funded
prisons, courts, and police, as well as violent and destructive gang activities,
not to mention increasing health problems, like obesity and all its excessive
results paid to correct by taxpayers!
Finally, in a later work, Laws, he listed his last thoughts about education, mainly in its 10th book. He mentions how important early childhood education is; it’s most important young children feel no pain, sorrow,
or terror. At 3 children should be allowed to socialize, play games, and sing together.
At 6 however, the sexes should be separated but given the same kinds of
education. At 10 children should be taught to read and write, so they could at least know the laws they were
expected to obey. Also they should begin learning more about Greek literature and music, but only those pieces
highly censored and aimed at producing good citizens. And during the teen years
they should start learning arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. It would promote feelings of how powerful and intelligent the gods were to keep such a magnificent system going year after year. It’s a nice example of how really practical the man was. His world was still dominated by war and the military, and so boys especially must be raised to be fearless, brave, and obedient. Without such soldiers Greece could again be easily conquered.
Aristotle's Moderate Model
Aristotle's educational model was, in some ways, a moderate compromise between liberal democrats like Democritus and Protagoras, and conservative Plato. However,
it was much closer to his aristocratic teacher Plato than to Democritus. Students were to be educated and taught
useful aristocratic character habits all at public expense and all in the same
way. But he wasn't able to rise above the confines of his own aristocratic habits of social divisions, and so he
wanted only a small group of male citizens to be educated; women remained
uneducated second class citizens. No doubt that is Aristotle's greatest educational weakness; it no longer
works in a much more democratic world.
In the last 2 chapters of his Politics he goes into some detail about how such children are to be educated, even in
infancy. He thinks they should be fed lots of milk to help them grow, and also as they grow be made to exercise
for coordination, how to move gracefully, play educational games, listen and
play certain kinds of music, and especially be kept from seeing how slaves act. If nothing else the Greeks were natural Behaviorists. They too saw how mere practice creates ideas, feelings, and similar habits.
Seeing how slaves are treated and act would weaken children's own
character training as aristocrats and men of leisure born to govern their
city-states. Today he would definitely be described as very right-of-center in
an educational spectrum, and almost unelectable in the US.
For him too slavery was natural and normal and women were not to be educated. Thus, in Athens only
about 20,000 men should go to school out of around 100,000 people.
And of course higher education at his Lyceum or Plato’s Academy was
reserved for the wealthiest or most talented. And again, for non-citizens, they were
to learn practical work-skills from their parents while even talented slaves were trained by their masters.
Within that narrow educational model, however, he
celebrated some respectable liberal ideas, the most important of which was
character training, helped with music and of course the right
kinds of actions. Both he and Plato felt the importance of such habits.
Young males were to be actively taught to feel pride in their Greek
traditions of excellence. With them the practical habits of a typical Greek aristocrat were to begin growing,
encouraged with enjoyable games and listening and playing music -- some of the
traditional Greek educational activities. He spends many pages talking about playing and listening to the right
kinds of music and its useful results for young aristocratic boys.
In fact, such activities are still a part of early education in most of
our public schools today, at least in the few districts still rich enough to pay
for them. But again, the bad news is his model was restricted to a very small class of male children!
What about his educational thinking for teenagers? Alas, it hasn't been preserved; either
he didn't finish it or it's been lost. As a result we really don’t know what specific subjects he thought best
to teach teenagers, but some scholars have offered educated guesses, as we’ll see a little later.
Even though his model aimed at educating a small group of
male citizens, he also felt the importance of one other liberal character idea
-- individual growth and independence! Learning such excellent skills
involved one's brains, wits, intuition, and the will to win, but again, they had
been an important part of aristocratic education since Homer's day in the 700s
BCE; Aristotle merely agreed with them. Such habits educated students to become people who could better control their own lives, while the rest were to meekly support the social status quo, as
Plato too wanted. In any case, learning such ideals of educational excellence were seen as a continuing process
all through life, and so such training was to begin in childhood. As a result, soon after Aristotle, such feelings for individual self-sufficiency and independence quickly found their way into Stoic and Epicurean models of ethical excellence as the Romans began building some public schools for some of their
citizens. And, of course, eventually, after 1600, those educational ideals began blossoming, helping
nurture more democratic feelings and habits. After all, how can anything new be
built without such habits of independence, individual growth, and intelligent
thinking, whether it's a new invention of a more excellent democratic political habit?
As for higher education at Aristotle's Lyceum, no doubt
only the wealthiest and most talented could continue their studies after
military training from 18-20. There he became famous for walking with his students and lecturing to
them at the same time, thus earning the nickname peripatetic; my first
philosophy professor constantly walked back and forth in front of the class as
he lectured; he was a follower of Ayn Rand who greatly admired Aristotle.
What were his lectures about? Naturally he felt his own philosophic ideas were at least important steps
on the road to Truth, if not the Truth itself. And so he taught them, as well as
philosophy's history, already over 2 centuries old. He probably told them about previous thinking weaknesses, and how his ideas improved on them. And no doubt students helped with his on-going biological and political research. To help him write the Politics, for example, students probably collected information from over 100
city-states, many of which were democratic. That was another important baby-step of
an improvement; he was much more tied to nature and its great diversity than Plato was.
What were some of his 'better' ideas? Well, like Plato, he too wanted to show secular Sophists they were wrong,
and that some kinds of unchanging objects existed and could be known with
contemplative reasoning. For him too nature is a living organism, even stars and planets!
It has an eternal and unchanging pyramid-like structure, capped off with
his god-like idea of a Prime Mover contemplating its own ideas for all
eternity. Thus most everything in nature was a combination of matter and eternal Forms; god for him was Pure Form but he never defined it. Democritus had a similar idea, but his god was made of atoms.
For Aristotle what caused nature’s eternal sameness were individual and
eternal Forms, but for him they were natural objects, not spirit-objects. For him Plato's dualistic spirit-matter
model of nature created too many unsolvable problems, the main one being how can
physical creatures like us can possibly know anything about spirit-objects;
they're completely non-physical? To him that was Plato's greatest weakness.
It's natural to assume he would have taught such ideas to his young students as they walked about the grounds.
Such knowledge really had no practical value, but it helped keep young
men from sinking into what Aristotle felt was the Sophist philosophic pit of
'might makes right' and there really is no ethical and political truth to
discover; for them power was what made the world go round.
To him such ideas were simply too radical, so he experimented with saying
there must exist some eternal and unchanging objects, whose knowledge would be
absolutely certain and eternally True. He assumed, for example, all plant and animal species have eternal Forms
in them and so knowledge about them could be certain!
Thus, higher philosophic education became basically a pastime for aristocratic men who had little else to do in life besides direct slaves to run their farms and talk with fellow citizens about city-state
politics. Science too became merely learning to pigeonhole animals and plants in their eternal species. Dogs exist because they have an eternal dog-Form in them.
Educational Psychology
Quite naturally, then, human psychology itself became very
important for liberals, moderates, and conservatives.
Democritus no doubt started the ball rolling in the 400s BCE.
How could an atomistic human mind possibly learn about atoms themselves,
or anything else for that matter? Basically he said small and smooth mind-atoms exist all through the body,
and so atoms out there react with them inside people, helping them learn about
them, and anything else we know. Conservatives like Plato, and moderates like Aristotle, rejected such a
model, and thus needed to build a very different psychology simply because they
wanted to show how people are capable of knowing eternal and unchanging objects
really exist, and thus can know absolute certainty. As a result, a faculty model of psychology was built and
became the standard one until the early 1900s!
Any model of educational excellence thus depended on human
psychology. At the beginning of his educational model in the Politicshe offered his
feelings about how important it was for legislators to get it right, as his
opening quote tells us. Writing like he just stepped out of Big Brother's conditioning lab, he says:
"The citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives" Thus, with his
psychology both Nazis and Communists would be justified in training racists and anti-capitalists who meekly accept their political elite! Such results to liberal democrats are obviously quite unacceptable; they
merely make it easier for leaders to keep endangering the lives of anyone holding different views and practicing different habits. To many Deweyan liberals today that general education model is more than
a little scary; it's downright anti-democratic, and thus against the public good. To us all citizens should be trained to practice intelligence and tolerance in a open democracy, where equal rights and opportunities are the same for everyone, and all law-abiding people are treated with respect.
About the faculty model, however, like Plato, Aristotle
too said all people have more or less separate mental
faculties;and like Plato too he even hinted one of them might be
non-material in nature, in order to know about unchanging Forms and how they
work. Philosophers have argued about that idea meant from that day to this, but chances are he purposely left
the idea of a non-material mental faculty vague; he himself simply wasn’t sure
whether it exists or doesn't. At any rate, he continued using a faculty model of psychological to build his
educational model. Moreover, each faculty, like reasoning or memory, was strengthened with the help of separate subjects. For example, history improved the memory faculty and logic improved the reasoning faculty. A strong reasoning faculty allowed philosophers like Plato and himself to contemplate
nature and mentally grasp or intuit what it's unchanging objects were really like.
Such a faculty model helped justify his educational model
and give it an air of scientific truth. With a faculty model students felt capable of learning anything if they
studied the right subjects and ideas. And it also helped justify his ideas about human development as
well. For example, there are, he said, 3 general stages of development.
In early childhood the dominant faculty was growth and movement; in later
childhood a more irrational psychic faculty became active; and finally in
adolescence a rational faculty began growing. Students became capable of following
logical arguments, and of thus grasping nature's Truth.
Thus teachers should plan their educational training according to how old
the student was, and not waste both student and teacher energies teaching what
children are not really ready to learn.
So, to about 7 or 8, children should focus on strengthening their bodies and coordination with intelligent kinds of exercise; the goal was to build useful character habits of grace and
coordination; light exercise and games should be the dominant skills learned. Their reasoning faculty simply was too immature to give abstract ideas like geometry much depth and meaning.
Then, to about 12 or 13, students should be given formal character training, to weaken their irrational faculty. Practice in building useful objects, telling the truth, and respecting just laws should be taught.
Besides making their lives easier, it would also help their city-state
work more peacefully and efficiently. And as Plato too recommended, children should be made to feel pain about acting passionately and irrationally, while feeling some pleasure about acting
rationally, gracefully, and honestly; Aristotle basically agreed.
Again, for such character training music was a very important teaching tool, both playing and listening to certain kinds of it. The wrong kinds of music would produce more counterproductive and irrational feelings and emotions, thus making academic studies later on that much more difficult.
Needless to say athletics continued on at this 2nd stage of growth.
Then finally, around 13, the intellectual faculty can start being trained, leading eventually to an individual
psyche capable of independently seeing the best ethical and political choices to
make, while a few philosophic types could begin contemplating the true nature of
an entirely self-absorbed, eternally meditating god. That idea alone stood atop both his educational and ethical models, just as a contemplating god stood stop his model of nature.
Contemplating it alone could produce the highest form of human
happiness. Plato, however, was much more cautious; for him philosophy should be put off until certain
conservative habits were stronger, like after 30. Before that young folks were more likely to become skeptical about conservative ideas.
Again, for Aristotle's right-of-center educational model,
women simply didn't have the same kinds of faculties as men; he was certainly no
women’s libber; only male citizens should be well educated.
And, as for what subjects should be taught in the teen years to help
strengthen their reasoning faculty, he doesn't say.
But as authors Boyd and King point out, it almost certainly wouldn't have
focused on math studies, as Plato recommended. Thanks to his careful reading of
Democritus, Aristotle was much more focused on this world and learning more
about its plants and animals than Plato ever was, and so biology and
history would probably have replaced mathematics as the main subjects
for young Greek men.
Why those subjects? Well, history can easily be used to keep teaching excellent Greek
character habits, like those in Homer's Odyssey. In it Odysseus is challenged again and again to think quickly about getting out of dangerous situations. And it can also be educational.
For example, it's one thing to read how Pericles built an economic
blockade around one rebelling city-state, in order to keep them in the Athenian
empire, rather than giving them their independence. But history can also be used to teach the habit-art of independent thinking as well! All the teacher need ask students is what they would have done in such
situations, and what the results of their choices would have been. Answering those
kinds of questions are what independent and intelligent thinking is all
about! Using history like that, so students can start focusing on seeing the probable results of their
decisions, thus helps build both student character and reasoning
excellence, rather than merely making them memorize more and more historical facts.
And, no doubt poetry would have been high on his recommended subject list. After all, he believed abstract universal Forms existed in individual objects and could be known; even rocks fell to earth because their natural desire was to seek the earth’s center; that was their natural Final Form.
What's more, poets are better at thinking about such universal ideas than
historians; thus students should study the poets and theiruniversal
abstractions! To him they were even more important than historical ideas; they can only teaches
particular facts, but poetic universals aim to know more real objects, those
closer to god’s ideas itself! Such ideas clearly show his fondness for training students to think with
general and abstract ideas, rather than experiment to see what results any idea
actually produces. In that respect he definitely helped the delay modern science itself.
It all goes back to his basic faculty psychology; abstract ideas like Forms were, for him, more real than any individual event, and so education should train young men to keep studying them.
Such feelings can be seen in his biological model too. From his doctor-father he
learned to respect natural events, and so he himself became a keen observer and
collector of them. Studying them helped our abstract thinking about how nature’s
eternal Forms work to build what we see in the natural world. Thus, his biology wasn't evolutionary in the least, as some earlier philosophers were. For him some eternal and unchanging objects are buried within individuals; he called them Forms, and a reasoning faculty was the only way to learn about them.
Every person, for example, had a piece of an eternal human Form within
them, even though he too couldn’t describe exactly how that can happen. Thus, students should merely learn how to classify animals and plants in their eternal and unchanging species. In general, then, his faculty
psychology helped justify such biological studies until Darwin's evolutionary
model opened to door to modern biology.
Educational Weaknesses?
Many high school students today would easily see many weaknesses in such conservative and moderate educational models. No doubt, delaying the growth of our strongest learning art --
experimental learning -- is the worst! Both Plato and Aristotle felt mere contemplative reasoning could grasp and behold nature's eternal objects and their Truth. As a result, experimental learning about how our world works and what's makes it go round was left to hang. Even from moderate Aristotle all species are eternal.
Experimental learning simply couldn't produce the kind of eternal and absolute Truth both Plato and Aristotle wanted, even though both knew doctors like Hippocrates was using it, but to them such knowledge was deeply flawed.
Even while Democritus was writing his many amazing books helping build Western civilization's scientific foundations, Socrates was questioning anyone he could to find absolutely unchanging abstract ideas. And as the Parthenon was being built, experimental medical students were carefully gathering useful knowledge from
their patients, noting symptoms and the results of medicines. For such liberal doctors, then, experimental learning was the best method for gathering more useful knowledge about disease and possible cures. Again, both Plato and Aristotle rejected such knowledge in their quest for absolute certainty.
Secondly, both Plato's and Aristotle's faculty psychology created a rather un-natural
model of how people actually learn anything. Rather than seeing how children start
learning their habits in childhood, by imitating their parents, they said
people already have learning faculties built into them at birth, and so mere
academic book facts are the best way to develop one's intellect!
Thus passive reasoning was the best way to learn about any of nature's
truths. For Plato such truths were spirit-Ideas, while Aristotle’s were eternal natural Forms.
Thus, with a faculty psychology, their educational goal wasn’t to change or improve life or nature, but merely to know it in all its grandeur. Their faculty psychology helped them believe nature didn't need improving. Dewey eventually called their learning models spectator theory of
learning; to him they were simply 2 more models of philosophic art, nothing more
and nothing less, rather than eternal Truth. They helped justify those deeper
feelings and assumptions about nature they began feeling in childhood. What's more, both Plato and Aristotle
felt such ideas, feeling how their philosophic models too were subject to doubt and questioning.
Even so, Aristotle continued building the model he felt was best. For example, because he
based his psychology on mere faculty reasoning, he believed health itself was
the result of balanced of internal fluids; when they become unbalanced disease
and sickness results. As a result, however, his contemplative habit was so strong it left little room for learning
more useful knowledge by practicing the slow trial-and-error experimental
learning model, even for someone as intelligent as he. So, the conclusion seems reasonable: personal habits and feelings formed in childhood confine even the most intelligent people, rather than any kind of
inbuilt psychic faculties.
About learning character habits, however, he was more liberal, thanks no doubt to his careful reading of Democritus. Thus ethical kinds of habits could only be learned by trial and error
practice. So, it should be easy to see yet another educational weakness of his; he created a dualistic system. Elementary education taught young men about aristocratic ethical values and ideas before they went to work in the family business, while higher education for wealthier students focused on more
philosophic ideas. In any case, however, the highest kind of truth could only be learned with contemplative
reasoning; for him and for Plato reasoning about abstract universal ideas
produced the best kind of knowledge and happiness. It was most like god itself! As a result, experimentally testing ideas really couldn't produce such knowledge; only intuitively and mentally seeing and grasping nature's ‘truth’ could. In fact, to Aristotle, only such reasoning with abstract ideas could produce the highest god-like happiness.
Thus the very narrow range of students too is another major weakness in his educational model. These days the more young folks can become better educated about what intelligent character habits feel like, and how to intelligently use their book-facts to keep improving life here and now, the better off all of us are. Otherwise a small minority will continue getting most of what's best in life while everyone else lives on a much lower level of opportunity. Welcome to our present world, as we saw in the last section! As a result, limiting educational opportunities helps create an on-going source of social resentment in people. Why should only those born into wealth and economic power have more opportunities than anyone else? So, the more educated everyone is, and the more they know how to use experimental learning creatively and constructively, the less they'll feel the need for criminal actions. Such results have led many liberals to say Aristotle was a rather cold and heartless Greek aristocrat; he certainly had a weaker democratic feeling for humanity than both Democritus and Protagoras, and perhaps even weaker than many of the US Constitution Framers. Like many of them he honored seemingly eternal social divisions of rich and poor, noble and common, free and slave.
As long as those social divisions remained in place, his
educational model centering on mere reasoning and learning more book-facts could
be justified. In fact, until quite recently such an aristocratic status-quo model was firmly set within Western
civilization's already economically stratified feudalistic societies. Such a system was made even more rigid
when, after him, Romans started ignoring periodic forgiveness of debt; it kept
the lower classes living truly miserable lives as they worked to support the
ruling classes, while fear and punishment, either religious or physical, were
used to keep that social status quo in place. In short, his and Plato's educational
models helped form the mainstream of Western education until the 1800s, while
Democritus's and Protagoras's more liberal democratic models of education and
politics were all but forgotten.
Roman Models
Within Roman society 2 educational improvements began, no doubt on a small scale. One was the idea of a public school system, and the other was educating both girls and boys. As a rule, Romans valued women’s contributions to society much more than the Greeks did.
Around the time Aristotle died in 322 BCE, the Romans began
building elementary schools for those families who could afford it.
Of course, those who couldn't afford to keep educating their children at
home, teaching them the practical skills useful at that time, like farming and
soldiering became standard. Also, character training remained an important habit-art whether a child went to
school or didn't. Such schools were called play schools where young Romans learned just the basics of reading,
writing, and mathematics. Young Romans also were taught how to be good citizens, and what their civic duty was; it was the educational goal even after the Empire began with Augustus, a few
decades before Jesus was born. By that time more liberal Stoic and Epicurean philosophic models were solidly
embedded within Roman society; the Stoic model, especially, celebrated everyone
having some kind of civic duty, and so ethical excellence meant learning to do
one’s work and seeing it as a solemn duty. Philosophic emperor Marcus Aurelius (26
CE -180) was a fine example of that idea. And for the upper classes the Epicurean atomist model of nature focused on pleasure as the highest good; no doubt far too many Romans took that idea to
gaudy excess, both with food and sex, but it certainly didn't inspire many
democratic feelings in people. Only the small upper class had the money to even learn about
philosophy. Most children ended their education at 12 or 13, and then went to work.
Much to Roman credit, however, public education began growing somewhat as a few such schools were built. As the lower class plebeians got more political power, slowly liberal Roman Stoics began seeing all citizens as deserving equal educational rights, and helping build their feelings for doingone's social duty towards others and the state.
In any case, with the growth of Rome's empire, education remained important and focused on practical secular subjects, like public speaking and military arts. Around the empire’s beginning was born important educators like Varro (d. 27 BCE) and Quintilian (100 CE). Varro wrote an early encyclopedia, and Quintilian wrote some 12 books on the art of teaching how to speak forcefully and persuasively. To him wise Romans should begin educating their children as soon as possible; he noticed they had powerful memories, and so he wasn't afraid to expand the rather limited number of subjects studied. To the 3 basic subjects of study, namely intelligent speaking, logical thinking, and
grammar studies, was added geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. For many superstitious people at the time, 7 was a sacred number and so there should be only 7 important subjects for educational excellence; the less superstitious Quintilian added also medical and architectural studies too. They were just as important as any others.
Then, during the so-called 2 century Pax Romana, from Augustus to Aurelius, more Roman secular schools were built and charged parents a fee. In the countries its armies had conquered, including Palestine, reading and writing of Latin and arithmetic was taught to Roman children. And of course for those who could afford it, more subjects were added in the teen years. No doubt one such school was even built at Sepphoris, an important Roman city a few miles from Jesus's Nazareth home, and probably also in the Decapolis towns east of Galilee's sea. There even young secular Hellenized Jews of noble birth, like Herod Agrippa (10 BCE - 44 CE), could learn to speak Latin and perhaps even some Greek; eventually the gospels too were all written in Greek around the time Quintilian was writing his books on public speaking.
France too became another area where Romans wanted to educate
young men in grammar schools; not many native Celts objected.
Unlike Palestine, secular studies were encouraged by their Druid
priests. Thus for about 200 years, Rome helped make Alexandria and its libraries one of 3 major advanced learning and research centers, the other 2 being Rome and Athens; today we call them
universities. To them thousands of upper class young men and women from around the empire flocked to learn more about this world, how to speak Greek and Latin well, and to create the
philosophic model of life and nature they thought most excellent.
In short, from its earliest days Roman education was centered on
teaching practical and useful subjects to students, including character
development --gravitas. And at the end of the Christian Middle Ages such schools would
again begin growing much stronger in Italy by the 1300s, helping create the
Italian Renaissance. In fact, Italy never really sunk as deeply into a Dark Age as did countries north of the
Alps. Thus individual excellence, or virtues, remained one of liberal education's
foundational ideas, celebrated by Dewey too in the 1900s.
Democracy was strengthened by habits of intellectual curiosity and
independent thinking, rather than the usual group-conformity to teachers and nly book-facts.
As a rule, however, in seems one of Rome's great educational
weaknesses was not teaching habits of excellent citizenship to all its
young folks. Thus feelings of duty and service eventually grew weaker and more self-indulgent with
war after war after war. And, the more corrupt and self-indulgent the ruling class became, the more vulnerable the empire itself became to invading barbarian armies.
No doubt, many Celts still wanted revenge for Julius Caesar’s mass
killing in France a few centuries before.
It took several centuries but Rome itself finally fell as Catholic Bishop
Augustine of Hippo was writing his famous City of God; it defended his Roman Church from the charge of Christians ignoring and angering the Roman gods, and thus allowing barbarians to destroy
it. For him all earthly empires pass, but the heavenly city of god doesn't.
Higher Learning
A few more words about ancient secular and naturalistic
university education may be said; their accomplishments were impressive
indeed. Many emperors after Augustus supported Athenian schools as one of Europe's 3 main higher-learning
centers. Stoic Emperor Aurelius, for example, saw how valuable ancient Greek philosophic models of life and
nature were, so he generously supported all 4 main Athenian philosophic schools,
financing 2 scholars for each to teach Platonic, Aristotelian, Atomistic, and Stoic ideas. As a result, almost everything in higher education was in place in 200 CE for modern experimental science to being blossoming as never before, actually learning to harness nature's energies with useful kinds of knowledge, and thus
help make life a little better for everyone. Centuries earlier, for example, the
ancient world’s greatest mathematician Archimedes (287 BCE - 212 BCE) even went
to the brink of creating the very useful study now called the infinitesimal
calculus. Also calculated with some accuracy were the earth and moon’s size and distance, and also the sun’s
distance from the earth!
So, what happened? The monopoly of conservative Church schools would effectively end secular
studies; the calculus would be discovered with Newton and Leibniz in the
1600s. No doubt Archimedes would have done it had he had our much simpler number system first built in India, taken to the Muslim world, and from there brought into Europe after 1,000
CE. With it Muslim scholars built the study of algebra. Sadly, however, the more barbarians invaded the empire after 300 CE, the more such universities were destroyed, and eventually replaced as churches were built with attached schools merely for religious education. One of the first things the Church did
in the 400s CE was close down all non-religious universities, including Plato’s and Aristotle’s.
In was a slow conservative process. Secular studies were still the educational foundation for Christians even
in the late 300s CE, before the great barbarian breakthroughs of the 400s. Before his baptism and his becoming the Church's main conservative propagandist, Augustine himself was a secular-minded
rhetoric teacher living in a loving relationship with his mistress and
illegitimate son. His very devout Christian mother Monica forbad him to marry beneath his class.
At Rome he even wrote about educational philosophy, and mentioned some
secular subjects every young educated Roman should know.
However, the conservative grip on the Church proved too
powerful. Roman schools were thus unable to compete with that monopoly.
At the lower levels of schooling they continued for a while relying
mainly on teaching only elementary book-facts, like Latin language and grammar
arts, but of what use were they when barbarians were tearing down and burning
buildings? Of what use was knowing how to write as elegantly as Cicero and Ovid when torches were flying? Speaking and writing Latin mainly helped the business and political class keep working, but more was happening in the empire than just those kinds of events.
No doubt, such language studies were useful to the literate few; Lucretius's great liberal Epicurean poem On Nature was one result. Centuries later it would introduce Renaissance scholars to Democritus's Atomistic model of life and nature, and thus become the philosophic foundation for modern science, but there were other serious social challenges secular schools simply couldn’t respond to. The Church’s answer to poverty and sickness with ideas of a perfect heavenly life after death proved too strong for most everyone. In truth, like every other human institution, if schools don’t keep changing and improving within an always changing world, then social excellence itself becomes that much more difficult. We're seeing that even today with increased social problems like crime, obesity, economic greed, conservative politics, and drug abuse. So, with today’s increasing rate of social and technological change, where new inventions and job changes are happening almost daily, the educational challenge to keep improving our schools is even greater. If something isn’t done about student university debt, it may take decades for people to pay them off. In any case, the growth of conservative Christianity brought some fundamental educational changes to the very definition of excellence, as we'll see in the next section.
3. EDUCATION HIGHLIGHTS: MEDIEVAL
From the Ancient to the Medieval
Conservative Christianity's educational model was based mainly on Plato's ideas and the conservative Jewish religious model. Within a few centuries after Jesus’s death its basic ideas began forming with the work of Paul of Tarsus, an educated Jewish rabbi and Roman citizen. Eventually it would dominate even more liberal and secular Roman and Greek models. Roman educational excellence celebrated many different gods in monotheistic provinces like Israel; social unrest often became openly violent. There the educational focus was on one god, not many, and base only on Mosaic Law for teaching character habits.
Centuries before Jesus, after the Jewish Babylonian captivity in the late 500s BCE, new spirit-ideas began growing with the help of new religious writings. With them came the ideas of a redeeming messiah or anointed one, an immortal soul, and ideas of an afterlife. By Jesus’s day synagogue schools began evolving as well, and teaching such ideas. The newer religious writings taught young Jewish boys the new messianic ideas of a soon-to-happen Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
Conservative Sadducees in Jerusalem, however, would have none of it. They remained faithful only to the Mosaic writings, which said nothing about an immortal soul or Kingdom of Heaven. No doubt, the new ideas expressed some very deep social anxieties about life in general, namely, that it’s quite unbearable and only a radical god-caused heavenly kingdom on earth could make it better. In Jesus’s day such end times were felt to be very near, as the Gospels tell us.
In any case, however, educating first born males, like Jesus, about Jewish ideas remained very important, and even easier to teach in northern Israel where less orthodox habits were practiced. The general religious rule about character was to 'give' first born males to god, so to speak, and teach them religious habit-arts; he, in turn, would then teach younger brothers and sisters about Jewish religious law and traditions. The New Testament itself tells us Jesus had 4 brothers and at least 2 sisters. Eventually he accepted a messianic mission and began telling Jews to repent, thus hoping to speed Yahweh’s help in sending his new kingdom sooner, rather than later. Again, the Gospels tell us his mission was only to Israelis; to orthodox Jesus non-Jews were unclean and to be avoided. And for his mission he recruited a small group of mostly illiterate Jewish men, teaching them more about his messianic mission, the new religious ideas, like life after death, the soon-to-arrive Kingdom of Heaven, and how Jews would rule and judge over the world’s nations.
So, in much of Palestine secular Roman education was simply unacceptable, especially to faithful Jews like Jesus; he was a practicing Jew all his life. To such Jews Rome was the devil itself, and a polluter of Jewish law and life. Eventually, however, as the expected kingdom of heaven did not happen, open revolt against Rome broke out in 66 CE and again in 70. After all, popular literature at the time educated people, including Jesus, to believe the messiah was to come from the warrior House of David. As the gospels tell us, not being of that house he was thus almost forced to argue against that widely accepted idea.
During his lifetime there were many different Jewish sects growing in Israel, each having their own educational model of excellence. The Zealot movement, for example, taught active revolutionary habit-arts. They educated young Jewish men to return oppressive Roman force with force; its Sicarii members carried knives for assassination purposes, and it was one of only 2 Jewish sects not spoken of badly in the New Testament, the other being the peaceful, reclusive, and pious Essenes, of whom John the Baptist was certainly one. Why weren’t they criticized? Well, they were both seen as teaching educational excellence, whereas moderate Pharisees, Scribes, and Sadducees were more tolerant of Roman rule.
Thus, after Jesus’s death for spreading sedition against Rome by claiming to be a king-messiah, a new Nazarene movement began growing in a still hopeful Jewish world of widespread disease, poverty, and suffering. Then, for years after his conversion to the small Nazarene movement , Paul of Tarsus slowly worked out the basic Christian educational theology: Jesus was the hoped-for messiah, and believing in his resurrection was all anyone needed to enjoy an eternally blissful life after death, basking in a spirit-world! He too believed the hoped-for Kingdom of Heaven was about to start unfolding any day. Being a Roman citizen and very well educated, he certainly knew about Plato’s dualistic model of nature, and his educational epistles celebrated such ideas. But again, when the expected return of Jesus didn't happened, the so-called Second Coming, and after the Romans just about wiped out Palestine's Jewish population in 70 CE, Christian leaders began defining their ideas to followers of the movement with many different gospels. Within their writings heaven was pictured not as an earthly kingdom, but as existing only in a spirit-realm, the kind Plato had written about some 400 years earlier. Soon many different gospels were written, helping teach people who Jesus was, why he was killed, and how miracles can happen to those pleasing god. Eventually 4 gospels became accepted. Thus conservative Plato's dualistic philosophic model of an immortal soul and a spiritual life after death for believers became embedded at the core of a growing Christian educational model.
In time the empire itself continued falling apart, and so the way opened for a Christian educational model to keep growing. After all, it was hopeful, and most everyone was poor, uneducated, hungry, many had diseases, and for everyone life was short. Thus, hope for a better life after death merely for believing Jesus was the messiah and had risen from the dead became more and more emotionally attractive and educationally possible. The old Platonic dualistic ideas were useful: nature is really a dualism of matter and spirit, and so eternal and unchanging spirit-objects like god and the immortal soul really exist; Christianity thus began getting a conservative philosophic respectability. Their ideas were very comforting for almost all uneducated, poor, and suffering people living truly short miserable lives. After all, then, as now, many rich folks continued ignoring the poor and kept working merely to increase their own fortunes. What should they care about the suffering masses, and many built vast estates outside of Rome. Eventually Augustine (d. 430), in his City of God, welded that dualistic Platonic model onto a Christian model of redemption and salvation, creating a new medieval educational model: nature is divided into an evil and corrupt material world full of devils, and a pure and perfect godly heaven; and only after accepting Jesus as their savior could anyone eventually enter a perfect and pain-free spiritual world after death. To the vast majority in the lower classes such ideas were very comforting.
Naturally, with such ideas, it slowly became more difficult for Roman secular schools to stay open; what need was there to teach Roman boys how to speak elegantly when the Christian movement was growing and barbarian spears and torches were everywhere? And, obviously, the more that happened, the more difficult it became to preserve secular skills and scientific research itself, still going on in the 3 great ancient universities at Athens, Rome, and especially Alexandria.
A little over a century after the Pax Romana ended around 180 CE, the conservative other-worldly Christian educational model was growing stronger within the empire. Then, shortly after 300 CE, after praying to the Christian god and asking for a victory in battle, Emperor Constantine became a Christian himself. For a while he ended Christian persecution and thus openly encouraged the religion’s growth. Naturally, the more its ideas spread, the more poor, destitute, and disabled throughout the empire joined the movement, as well as all those educated people who wanted an eternally perfect and blissful life too. Merely believing Jesus was god, died for their sins, and rose from the dead became core Christian educational beliefs.
Slowly, then, Roman secular schools were replaced with the conservative Christian model of monastery and church schools, teaching only those ideas and ritual habits. For them life’s absolute Truth had finally been revealed. Even though god had created the world, it was seen more and more as merely a testing ground for the faithful; one’s natural thoughts about sex, for example, really came from evil devils. The natural world thus became something to retreat from and shut out, with all its devil-causing sinful temptations, diseases, and pains. They were now taught not as natural events and things to study, but rather as sent by god as a punishment for sin, even though god was supposedly all-good, all-merciful, and all-powerful. The more people were taught to practice religious habits, the less they bothered asking how devils could even possibly be created by such a god. How can anything imperfect and evil possibly come from something perfectly good, loving, and merciful? In such an educational system based on habits rather than logic and experimental learning, it would take many centuries before such questions would be asked again.
What's more, because such ideas were said to be absolute Truth, they shouldn’t even be questioned. Thus all educational competition, especially from non-religious secular schools, should not be tolerated! Orthodox Christians like Augustine wanted a complete and total educational monopoly, even over different Christian sects. Thus the secular universities throughout the empire quickly became targets for zealous Christians, eventually closing them in the early 500s. For example, even in the 200s CE Christian intolerance was practiced; an Alexandrian mob caught a neo-Platonic mathematician named Hypatia and literally scrapped the flesh from her bones! Roman religious tolerance was rapidly becoming a thing of the past! After all, Plato too was intolerant of atheists and agnostics, and so it was easy for even Augustine in the 400s to help violently crust a heretic Christian sect in North Africa! The quest for a Catholic monopoly caused warfare to become more powerful in Western civilization, setting a precedent for the brutal Inquisition itself beginning in the 1200s.
Also, around Hypatia’s time, the world-class libraries at Alexandria were burned. Scholars thus lost the desire to keep working in their primary home. Slowly, what books they still had were sent east into Syria and eventually to Bagdad; there secular learning and research was much more alive and growing. Even liberal Greek atomist ideas were treated with much more respect by many Arab scholars, even in the 800s. And much to their credit, much of Aristotle's lecture notes were saved as well, even after Islam became the religious model of excellence. His much friendlier feelings about nature and natural science would eventually find their way back into Europe via Muslim Spain in the 1100s, thus helping young university students like Thomas Aquinas build a much different educational model of life and nature.
A Religious Curtain Descends Around Europe
Meanwhile, as the ancient world was closing in the 400s, conservative Christians continued building their educational monopoly. They taught youngsters Christianity was the absolute Truth, and any other ideas were not to be tolerated; for many centuries only one major philosopher was active and challenged orthodox ideas, one Irishman named John Erigena (d. 877). He eventually built a Christian pantheistic model of nature, later re-painted without Christian ideas by Baruch Spinoza (d. 1674): nature is god and god is nature. Such deistic ideas were quite similar to what Democritus had painted in the ancient world, and would become quite acceptable to man US Founders like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. For most everyone else, however, Christian feelings about absolute Truth were so much a part of education, and taught to so many, even today conservative Christians and Muslims feel only their models of life and nature are True, and everyone else’s is less than excellent. Only recently have more people begun seeing a more liberal model of truth: all religious truths merely reflect merely different kinds of habits -- habits formed with actions and practices.
Again, the conservative Christian educational model was thus vastly different from both Greek and Roman secular schools. For subject matter Christians substituted the Bible, and for its learning method ritual practice replaced reading and logic. Actually for conservative Catholic Christians reading the Bible became much less than desirable, no doubt because of its many contradictory ideas. Such knowledge could only help form difficult questions. For example, who was the real Jesus? Even the gospels themselves differed greatly and painted contradictory portraits. Teaching Christian ideas with ritual habits avoided all such problems.
Slowly, monasteries and nunneries evolved, along with physical punishment for sin and hours of daily praying and hymn singing for young priests and nuns. No doubt such nunneries liberated many women from their kitchen work, but not from obedience to religious ideas and habits. As teachers do today in conservative schools, abbots and mother superiors had all the authority, and the Bible became the only book allowed. Even as a child Augustine was often whacked by his Roman teachers whenever he didn’t stay focused on what was being taught; god forbid anyone should have any kind of independent thought or question. And of course later on, as philosophic logic was growing stronger after 1000, even brutally killing dissenters with public burnings and hangings were used to 'educate' people about Christian ‘Truth', and against the new ideas of experimental science and a sun-centered astronomical model. Even in the 1500s its modern creator Copernicus (d. 1543) was afraid to publish his Christian-shattering sun-centered ideas. After all, Aristotle said the earth was the center of the universe, the absolutely certain Bible endorsed the idea, and Thomas Aquinas accepted it; end of discussion. Anyone who disagreed endangered their own life.
The Medieval World Dawns
Such a conservative educational system evolved slowly. Even many Christian conservatives like Tertullian (d. 225 CE) and later Jerome (d. 420 CE) still made a place for secular Roman learning. Radical Tertullian ( I believe in Christian ideas because they’re absurd!) still saw secular Roman schools as basically the best option for educating Christian boys, so they could at least learn to read the Bible and other religious writings, then written in Greek. And even centuries later, in his desert cave, hermit Jerome still felt guilty about reading pagan Cicero, whose head and hands were cut off and publicly displayed as a lesson to all Roman republicans!
In Roman schools of the 200s CE, the so-called 7 liberal arts were actively taught with secular subjects like geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy. Slowly, however, all that began changing as Christians continued building their educational monopoly. Everything focused on teaching obedience to ritually religious habits and ideas. After all, slaves, obey your masters, had been a status quo idea of Paul’s from the beginning. And to help build its monopoly three very radically conservative Christians focused their energies.
Augustine (d. 430 CE) was the first. As the Empire was literally collapsing around him, Augustine worked to justify Christian ideas in his City of God. In his zeal to anchor everyone's feelings only to his Bible's 'Truth', he said secular studies like rhetoric and logic should be illustrated only with Biblical ideas. To him Christian ideas were the be-all and end-all of life and learning – the incarnation of absolute and eternal Truth. They were all anyone would ever need to receive god's grace for a heavenly reward, even though the very idea of free will became questionable when he also said god already knew who would be saved and who wouldn’t! Almost no one could read Latin or Greek, and so such logical problems were rarely felt or questioned. Augustine, like Tertullian before him, saw a crucial educational truth: habits are much stronger than logic itself, and so the educational emphasis should be on practice, not reading and asking logical questions.
Such an educational model thus made critical kinds of question-asking almost impossible. Only to those who didn’t practice Christian habits did it seem logical to ask: if mere belief in the resurrection was needed for salvation, then why practice any church rituals? If we are saved only by grace, then why be baptized or confess any sins? In fact, questions liked that eventually asked by Martin Luther (d. 1546) finally broke the Catholic educational monopoly and helped launch the Protestant Reformation itself in the early 1500s. According to Christianity's founder Paul of Tarsus, people are saved by faith alone, showing yet again how the force of Catholic habits triumphed for centuries over logic itself. Martin Luther eventually overcame such habits while actually reading the Bible. Even so, for centuries building powerful and propulsive ritual habits in their monasteries and schools trained young Catholics to keep ignoring almost the entire natural world and all its liberating energies and knowledge. For people like Augustine they should be replaced with Christian rituals and other-worldly myths. Such a religious, spirit-based educational monopoly had been at the heart of Plato's political thinking as well; even Aristotle felt such habits help keep people obedient, passive, and accepting. Rebellious feelings were thus reduced to a minimum.
Two other very conservative Christians also helped destroy the secular Roman education model for at least 4 centuries. Within about a century after Augustine's death, 2 Christian leaders also helped justify their Bible-based educational monopoly. As Emperor Justinian was closing all the empire's non-Christian schools and universities in 529, and even forbidding teaching philosophy in Athens, Benedict (d. 543) and Pope Gregory 1 (d. 604) helped close the remaining secular schools. As Plato had done centuries earlier, they too turned away from teaching young folks how to keep experimentally knowing about this world's natural movements and causes, learning how to harness its natural energies with better tools, and continue liberating people from horrible diseases, poverty, ignorance, drudgery, slavery, and hopelessness. For them too an all-loving and powerful god had unknowable reasons for creating and maintaining the miserable world most everyone lived in; that mere philosophic assumption struck at the heart of liberal education and scientific research itself. What need for Church rituals would any educated person have?
Thus, educational and character excellence for true Christians meant withdrawing from studying nature and life in this world, as Buddhism’s Siddhartha Gotoma had preached in his Fire Sermon centuries earlier. Jesus too redd religious books and probably nothing else. People were thus to be taught to withdraw from life and learning, much like the ancient Essenes had done in Jesus’s day; life should be lived to please a god, and for the lower classes to keep working to support the ruling classes. Like Augustine before him, Benedict's rules for monastic life continued reducing the objects of learning to Christian miracle-stories, worship habits, and of course teaching them to children and converts, helping ensure their acceptance and continuing practice. They too knew such habits are propulsive.
Bishop of Rome Gregory 1, called by Christians the Great, agreed with that educational model, and his writings thus encouraged people to believe in spirit-caused miracles. He too pictured such ideas as the only eternal and unchanging absolute Truth people should learn. With such feelings he eagerly wrote about many miracle stories involving Benedict himself:
"A certain woman there was which some time he had seen, the memory of which the wicked (devil) spirit put into his mind, and by the memory of her did so mightily inflame ... the soul of God's servant ... But suddenly, assisted with God's grace, he came to himself, and seeing many thick briers and nettle bushes to grow hard by, off he cast his apparel, threw himself into the midst of them, and there wallowed so long that, when he rose up, all his flesh was pitifully torn; and so by the wounds of his body he cured the wounds of his soul. ...
(As an abbot Benedict) insisted upon observance of strict virtue (a Latin word for excellence), so that the monks, in a rage, decided to poison him with a glass of … wine. He, however, made the sign of the cross over the glass, whereupon it broke in pieces. So he returned to the wilderness.
(And in a letter to another bishop about teaching grammar he writes) ... It came to our ears, what we cannot mention without shame, that (you are) in the habit of expounding grammar to certain persons. ... the praises of Christ cannot find room in one’s mouth with the praises of Jupiter. (Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, 379, 385)
Apparently such evil secular subjects, like learning to speak properly to followers and think logically, were much less important than actually accepting Christian ideas and practicing its rituals. Tor people like Tertullian such accepting simply resolved all logical problems, as they did for Augustine too. Faith eliminates the need and desire to think critically. No doubt, Benedict and Gregory too sensed the strength of a Christian willpower formed with habits and practices, rather than logic and debate, even in the 500s CE.
As a result, soon nuns and priests were being educated to spend about 9 hours every day and night praying and chanting psalms, thanks to Benedict's religious rules and Gregory's love of music. Gregorian chants can be heard even today and still appeal to many; pre-adolescent boys were often said to sound like angels themselves. Thus many of the arts too became Christian educational tools, including music, painting, and statue-making. Religious pictures would dominate Western civilization until well into the modern period, starting in the 1600s. Even Plato and Aristotle had wanted music used as educational tools. And when priests, monks, and nuns weren't praying and chanting, many would practice their artful religious writing skills by routinely copying books; they thus at least kept art and writing skills alive, as the famous ornate Book of Kells shows. Also, as we’ll see a little later, their collecting old Roman and Greek manuscripts for their libraries would one day keep opening the Renaissance door in Italy in the 1400s.
Before that, however, one great educational weakness was ignored in the conservative Christian model: human nature simply isn't built to keep ignoring and withdrawing from the natural world! That may be said to be Christianity's original sin against humanity! Not only is there simply much more to learn than just obeying Christian rituals and accepting their ideas, but natural evolution itself had selected people who were naturally curious about life! Such creatures thus learned more survival skills, like how to build tools to make food more available and thus improve life. In short, conservatism itself is to an extent unnatural: it tries to stop change and improvement in a nature continually changing and thus creating the need for more improvements! As a result, it was just a question of time before its educational monopoly began weakening, and finally ignored altogether by progressive liberals in the late 1600s! Belgium schools began ignoring religious ideas altogether.
Gregory himself is a good example of how impossible it is to stamp out all secular studies and arts, like logic and reading, and above all, keep ignoring human curiosity and experimentation completely. Such goals were doomed to fail in the long run. Why? Well, for one thing, some practical and logical thinking was needed even to find out how practical and logical thinking can be stamped out! Gregory's own aristocratic education had taught him useful secular habits, like how to increase someone’s power. With such skills he thus helped increase his own religious power over other bishops. At the time the Church was still very de-centralized and governed by district bishops, of which his Bishopric at Rome was merely one. Christianity at the time was similar to decentralized US banking in the 1800s. But, with Gregory’s own secular habit-arts, his job as Bishop of Rome slowly became more like the old empire itself, with its power being centralized and him eventually being called Pope, or papa!
Try as they might, then, Church leaders just could not completely disregard secular subjects like grammar and logical thinking. For another things, as congregations grew and sermons became more important, priests themselves had to learn good reading, speaking, and reasoning habits, and so rhetoric, grammar, and logic slowly became more and more important. Even in the late 700s Charlemagne (742-814) himself complained about many priests not being able to write or read very well; how could they convince parishioners of their Truth if they couldn't speak and write well themselves? Slowly, however, challenges from many different directions continue weakening the Christian goal of educational monopoly. One came from the great Frankish king Charlemagne himself.
A Secular Learning Door Stays Ajar
Even in the 600s Christian other-worldly schools were weak in Spain. One Isadore of Seville, for example, wrote about 30 books summarizing all secular knowledge at that time and place, even though much of it was largely based on merely accepting mythical beliefs and tall-tales without actually testing them for their accuracy. In that respect, he’s a good example of how weak the conscious art of experimental testing still was. If he could find someone who merely said something was true, that was enough for him; mere reliance on authority thus remained the main learning method in much of Christian Europe, rather than the much more powerful experimental learning art. And the more it was practiced, the more Christian ideas were challenged.
Then, beginning in the late 700s, Vikings added their challenges to Christian education practices. No doubt, learning to sail on the sea itself became a real challenge. The Vikings injected such exploratory energies into Europe, and in time would eventually open up a completely New World to explore, learn about, and if possible dominate as much as possible. After all, the Bible had justified slavery many centuries earlier.
In the quest for loot they began attacking all over Europe. Even while most people still felt spirits themselves directly caused them to think their thoughts, both good and sinful, Vikings began challenging people to think more about what's happening here and now, and how to defend themselves. For example, as they continued plundering all over Europe, looting and burning even Canterbury cathedral itself in the mid-800s, and again in the late 900s, monks adapted to the changing situation and simply migrated north into Scotland and Ireland, bringing with them whatever books they had, and reading them in their little stone huts. With Charlemagne however, the Northern European secular educational door was opened wider; his education leader named Alcuin, in fact wanted schools built throughout the kingdom, so more people could learn to speak and write more clearly. Charlemagne probably couldn’t write well himself, but he loved to collect books, probably had them redd to him, and kept a castle school at Aachen in no
Some 4 centuries after Gregory, Charlemagne began reminding people how useful secular kinds of knowledge are. He soon built a more progressive school at Aachen to which young, more secular minded young European nobles flocked to learn as much as they could about how to act like a gentleman, rather than just an obedient and faithful Christian. Naturally, as those new habits continued growing, curious and knowledge-loving people kept growing more secular and liberal habits.
Brutal and fearless Norse Vikings did something else to Christian Europe. They started injecting different secular energies into European life to actively learn more about life and nature. In their raids they satisfied their desire for trinkets, adventure, and knowledge, eventually sailing all the way to North America and much of Europe as well! They began pillaging any English and Irish monastery for their valuable gold, silver, and jewels. Like US Robber Barons in the 1800s, and many greedy people today, gold and silver were valuable for buying the power, respect, and high social status many craved. Vikings traveling east eventually founded Moscow in the 800s and, when necessary, even hauled their small boats overland, finally reaching Constantinople itself.
No doubt, in the process they took barbarity and brutality to new heights, but they also injected great amounts of explorative energy, bravery, and curiosity into Europe, not to mention warfare. Such learning habits and energies had been lacking for centuries. Eventually, however, as the Norsemen were converted to Christianity, many priests who had migrated to Ireland simply came back into Europe and there also helped re-energize a more secular educational model. So, along with the quest for loot, Viking curiosity about the natural world was a big help in breaking Christianity's other-worldly educational monopoly. Exploring and learning more about our natural world simply made life much more interesting and challenging; there was, in fact, much more to their god's world than any Christian hermit, monk, or pope ever dreamed existed. Eventually, its knowledge and facts became the only way life can ever be improved.
Also, in the 800s, more secular schools began growing in Italy. At Salerno, for example, a medical school was founded and began directly challenging the Church's restrictions on human dissection; thus human anatomy began growing. There thousands of students from all over Europe continued disregarding the Church's restrictions. And also, as Muslims continued capturing more of Spain, southern France, and Italy, they brought with them more secular studies. Thus, some 2 centuries before 1000 CE, the Church's conservative educational monopoly was weakened by many different sources. As a result, more and more people began realizing it's practically impossible to entirely close off human thinking, learning, and controlling the natural world with religious habits. Sooner or later people get tired of focusing on just one set of rituals for salvation. It thus became easier for people like Charlemagne to keep re-igniting secular learning; he also collected a great many ancient books and inspired noblemen to build more secular castle schools like his own. Thus, to more and more people religion itself started feeling as merely one set of habit among many, rather than the only subject worth studying, and the only ideas worth knowing.
If ever there was a godfather of France's 1700s Enlightenment, Charlemagne was it. In his school he taught character habits; young noble boys were to practice the aristocratic habits worthy of their class and the gentler side of their religion. Eventually a code of chivalry evolved, in which helping the poor and defending helpless women became an important part of Christian character building. Robin Hood was far from the first protector of the poor.
Of course conservative monastery schools continued focusing on teaching Biblical spirit-ideas and rituals, praying, and singing their Gregorian chants. For them such educational excellence was the Only Truth, everlasting and eternally unchanging; in most everyone such habits remained strong and propulsive. No doubt, such schools kept demanding group obedience to Christian values, and for about 600 years, until 1000, the Church pretty much kept a virtual educational monopoly. For those who learned to read, the Bible remained the only book worth reading, much like students today are anchored to their textbooks in our conservative schools. After all, it was essentially the ancient model Plato and Aristotle used; both anchored thinking to reasoning about and contemplating what they said were already-existing eternal objects.
Eventually, as more modern ideas of truth evolved, a big difference was seen. Essentially the conservative model of truth is backward-looking. Only knowing already-existing objects and ideas could produce eternal Truth and learning excellence, like already existing spirits or natural Forms, and so only books about those ideas should be studied. Thus mere contemplation and reading became the best learning method. The truth is what someone long ago said was the truth! Perhaps the best example of that idea was the Mosaic tradition; Mosaic writings already saw the truth, and so only they need be studied. To this day orthodox Jews still practice that art of debating what they really mean. For Isadore too, the Truth already existed and learning it was merely a question of reading the right books.
However, with the growth of more liberal models of nature and learning, natural curiosity could best be satisfied only with a forward-looking experimental testing model! As mentioned earlier, the forward-looking medical school at Salerno began dissecting corpses to learn more about disease and anatomy, rather than keep relying on prayer and using relics to cure diseases. So, as nature was pictured in more liberal terms, with ideas like atoms, more people became liberated to first experimentally learn how nature moves, and then use such knowledge to actually keep building a more satisfying world. Thus a more liberal forward-looking educational model began growing. In it reliable facts were best used as practical tools, rather than as merely something to accept or keep debating about. The debate moved from understanding a meaning to actually how such ideas should be used. For example, how does reproduction actually occur, and how should, say, a woman be allowed to control her own reproductive events? Naturally, in the late Middle Ages, as that more forward-looking experimental model of truth kept growing, it continued challenging conservative educational models. With the new liberal model, truth wasn't merely accepting already existing ideas, it was something we continue creating and discovering with intelligent and creative experimentation, like inventing new tools and objects to make life better!
Then, after 1000 CE, a kind of psychic dam seemed to burst. More thinking people became greatly disillusioned with the important religious idea of a Second Coming. Why was god waiting over a 1000 years to send Jesus back to earth to build a heavenly kingdom? As a result, more people liberated themselves from such ideas. Even in the 1000s some were questioning god's existence itself! They heard about Muslim skeptics denying the Christian god altogether! So, at England's most famous cathedral, Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1104) wrote a famous argument he said proved god exists. It goes something like this: god is the most perfect idea of which can be thought, and because perfection must include existence, god itself must exist! Philosophers and undergraduates have been taking about it ever since.
In the late 1100s Peter Abelard was no doubt the most powerful Church critic of his time. He wrote a book called Yes and No in which he showed about 100 important religious questions could be answered with both yes and no! Thus, after 1000, there began a rather interesting sequence of events in Europe. As more and more secular studies began growing with the founding of universities, there also began a series of religious wars, no doubt aimed at solidifying peoples' religious beliefs; today they're called the Crusades! War thus helped divert people from more progressive thinking.
As Abelard was challenging conservative religious leaders to think more clearly about their ideas, the 1st Crusade began in 1096. Pope Urban 2 got a call for help from the Byzantine emperor for troops, and so to create volunteers he promised forgiveness from their sins if they joined the army. The University of Bologna was also founded in the late 1000s. It began training lawyers to start focusing on words and their meanings much more clearly than before.
As the University of Paris was taking form in the mid-1100s, a 2nd Crusade was launched in 1147. It lasted but 2 years. Evidently the army organized its own leaders who then led a rebellion against the whole campaign; already they saw no real reason for traveling all the way to Palestine just to capture Jerusalem and then see the Muslims re-conquer it a few years later.
As Oxford University was being founded in the late 1100s a 3rd Crusade began in 1189, led by England's pious Richard 1. It would last some 3 years and accomplish practically nothing except learning more about the more advanced Muslim civilization at the time.
A 4th Crusade began in 1202, lasting about 2 years, and shortly after that Cambridge University was founded in 1209. Even a Children's Crusade formed in 1212, many of them already believing god would help their cause with miracles. In fact, many children froze and starved to death on the way to Palestine. Needless to say, those events were educational to many. There was much more to life than there was in any religious book.
Then, as the 1200s unfolded, many more universities were founded. No doubt they still focused on teaching Christian ideas and habits, but even so, the Church's infamous Inquisition was also founded, to help keep dissent and free-thinking to an absolute minimum, as well as cause many scholars to fear such thinking. So, did the Church use warfare to help combat a growing secular movement, as perhaps even the US government used World War 1 and 2 to help weaken a serious liberal threat to its powerful conservative upper class -- the widespread Progressive and Labor movements? Interesting questions, are they not, especially if we look at the events causing the US to go to war at those times? In any case, however, one fact remains obvious: war and violence have often interrupted and delayed many different kinds of progressive democratic movements. Did military generals convince naïve President Johnson to escalate the Vietnam War to help stall liberal programs in congress?
Ultimately, however, a complete conservative otherworldly educational goal was almost impossible to keep in place. Again, it went against human nature and nature itself! For hundreds of millions of years, nature had selected animals who were better at exploring more of the surroundings, using their senses and brains to find food, safety, and reproductive opportunities. Even 2 million years ago, our early human ancestors boldly felt such curious and experimental instincts. Tool-making habits began building an instinctive feeling: life can be improved with a little constructive and inventive tool making, thus making food easier to get and life more worth living. And since then, the instinct had only grown stronger, becoming ingrained in anyone who actually practices such learning skills. As a result, it was almost impossible to completely snuff out the desire to merely accept the world as it is, and keep bearing its pains and sorrows.
Early Muslim educational habits, however, weren’t nearly so conservative. Scholars there had redd their Aristotle and so it was easier for them to build universities centuries before Christian Europe, even in Timbuktu. Eventually from Muslim scholars in Spain would come copies of Aristotle's lecture notes, soon translated into Latin, and then on to Europe. In the 1200s at the newly formed University of Paris Thomas Aquinas would use them to wean the Church from the other-worldly Platonic educational foundation Augustine had built for it. Thomas’s replacing it with an Aristotelian sense-based model of learning was, no doubt, another major turning point in Western civilization’s educational history. Curiosity and exploration were irrepressible instinctive feelings for many people, and they continued helping justify a much more liberal education model, one much closer to liberal Democritus than to conservative Plato. The result was liberating; today even religious universities include scientific studies as part of their curriculum. That's more good news for we liberals who are now working to educate people about how they too can help liberate our educational and political systems from control and dominance by a small wealthy conservative class who continue trying to monopolize their control over both of them. Since the late 1930s they have been quite successful at controlling more money and the educational media, but how long it will last is now becoming a serious question; too many other educational tools have developed since then, helping more people feel more educational options.
Life Itself Challenged Conservative Religious Ideas
No doubt, teaching only conservative spirit-models of life continued giving hope to fearful and uneducated people living within a still unscientific and very dangerous world. But Periodic plague often killed thousands even as most children were taught to feel devils were literally everywhere, and also feel life itself was merely a short cosmic test for an eternally perfect heavenly reward. Most everyone continued believing nature was seething with uncontrollable evil spirits bent on increasing their numbers with corrupting thoughts, temptations, and pleasurable actions, commonly called sins. Prayer books remained important. Thus, life itself was challenging many basic religious ideas. Many thoughtful people began questioning basic Christian ideas. For example, how could an all-merciful god save only some and condemn most everyone else to eternal punishment even before the universe was created!
Devastating plague beginning in the 1300s kept sweeping through towns and cities killing thousands. How could an all-loving and powerful god allow such senseless events? Ever-changing life itself was thus helping educate people to see it differently from the status quo conservative model. Although many were taught to believe god was punishing sinners, people also saw how good and faithful people were dying, so again, how could an all-merciful god allow such events? Why wouldn't an all-good and powerful god simply end all suffering? What kind of a god allows good people to suffer needlessly?
The conservative educational model of life and nature was weakening with nature's help itself. No doubt, most people continued accepting the ideas priests told them were true, like god might miraculously heal good people, but ultimately many natural events were beyond all understanding and thus mysterious. Thus learning options were restricted to old religious arts and habits. Completely natural sexual thoughts continued being seen as coming from devils themselves! Such simplified and ultimately mysterious Platonic-like reasoning remained strong, but for many, the all-important will and instinct for questioning such ideas was growing stronger with more confident and independent learning habits! So, even as monks and nuns still chanted for hours every day lest they too be lured to hell-fire in a world awash with legions of unspeakably evil spirits, new kinds of secular thinking and questioning skills were growing. More people stopped making the sign of the cross for driving evil spirits away; they didn’t seem to do much good against plague and disease anyway. Also, if god was perfect reasoning, then how could it even create illogical religious systems? And if we were all created in god’s image, then why should any idea be beyond our reasoning powers?
At the heart of that more liberal questioning habit-art lay active experimental and questioning instincts and impulses. As mentioned earlier, soon after 1000 CE the French scholar Peter Abelard, and later the Englishman William of Occam (1287-1347), would openly challenge and question many of the Church’s religious ideas of Truth, like exactly what could be known about spirit-objects with reason alone? Such questions challenged the very reliability of such ideas! Were they merely true or merely assumptions necessary for theologians to build their religious models of life and nature? In that dawning secular and scientific world, even a few religious people began asking how mere reason alone could produce accurate and reliable knowledge. How could merely reading books ever teach anyone how reliable and truthful any idea is, or how to actually make the world a better place?
Thus the conservative educational art of passively reading and accepting ideas was challenged itself! Such challenges thus continued weakening the conservative religious monopoly on teaching only religious ideas. Why bother mentioning such facts. Well, such habits are still at work today in our modern conservative schools. Today we liberals shouldn't believe our schools are much different from medieval ones, just because we now have computers and many scientific facts. In fact, the passive teaching method in both medieval and modern conservative schools is the same. Students are still not completely free from that passive learning model of merely reading more and more book-facts. Today conservative public schools continue teaching the same kinds of passively accepting habits about secular facts. They tell students what should be studied while ignoring how to use their knowledge to keep making our world more democratic and equal! As a result, most children today are still psychically anchored to their teachers and textbooks, but without putting their ideas to any real constructive use and test. Thus, such ideas remain weak and unfelt, and are thus often quickly forgotten. They still have no real emotional depth to them. What’s more, character habits have also been almost completely ignored on a formal learning level.
In any case, after 1000 CE, the natural world's facts started becoming the objects of knowledge, and what's more, learned with a new experimental testing method. In England and France fearless and robust Norse invaders became Christians, but their curious instincts, built with exploring habits, eventually helped make simple acceptance of confusing Christian ideas even more difficult for more people, like Abelard and Occam. Scholars quickly turned such instincts into questions. If god is perfect rationality, for example, then how can it possibly create non-rational religions like Christianity? Such questions became more common in the newly formed universities, even though they remained overwhelming Christian.
Also, as Viking sailing skills increased their confident feelings to keep exploring the natural world, they too helped build more useful knowledge and facts about nature, and thus helped build a new, more active experimental learning model, even if it was still on a subconscious level. Soon places like Italy, England, western France, and the Netherlands continued building universities, and focusing more on learning more about our natural world, thus helping clear the way for a more liberal humanistic Renaissance movement begun in Italy in the 1300s.
As we've seen, in the 1200s several universities were founded and became places where young folks could ask more intelligent questions about both religious and natural truth. How were they related to each other? Did each kind of truth exist in completely different realms, or were there some religious ideas reason could discover, like proving god exists? Was god’s existence provable, or was it merely another assumed idea? Slowly, such questions and logical reasoning became part of the new experimental thinking scene, at the University of Paris and then at Oxford in England. More students thus became more conscious of them, thanks to some of their teachers. At them intelligent students too began asking more fundamental philosophic questions, like do eternal and unchanging objects really exist, if so what are their natures, and if not, what’s the best way to start learning about our ever changing world? What really are universal ideas like god and the soul? Are they just ideas and words, and do universal ideas like tree and mankind really exist? If they do, then where are they, in objects themselves, or in another spirit-realm, and also, how can we test those ideas?
Thus, at least at the higher levels of learning, liberal philosophic questioning began challenging young folks to build a new, more secular learning model. If there were literally hundreds of religious models, then how could anyone claim only one was the eternal Truth? In the early 1000s western France had absorbed enough robust and independent Norse energies to begin asking such questions. In fact, Abelard became such a dynamic teacher he quickly took students away from more conservative ones, like mystical Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153). Eventually, however, Abelard lost his academic freedom and retreated to monastic life. Morally and intellectually he just didn't fit into a church-controlled educational monopoly, but he was just the beginning.
Soon afterwards, other bold and curious scholars like Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, William of Occam, and Nicholas of Cusa continued experimenting with their questions. With them they continued liberating themselves and many students from conservative and doubtful religious ideas and habits. In the 1300s Occam’s reasoning became so sharp he quickly became a major thorn in the Church's side, eventually being excommunicated and fleeing to Germany for his life.
Slowly and surely, then, more confident and capable people kept asking more intelligent questions about our natural world, how it works, and most important of all, began testing their answers experimentally. Soon, the educational result was a completely new and different learning art: experimental learning. In England it had been growing since the 1200s! With some very capable men like Robert Grosseteste (d. 1253) and the Franciscan Roger Bacon (d.1292), experimental learning became a consciously active habit-art. They consciously used the same experimental testing art to answer their scientific questions as ancient doctors like Hippocrates had used in the 400s BCE to answer medical questions! Bacon discovered his senses helped produce many more reliable facts and knowledge than merely accepting on faith what the truth was. The rainbow, Bacon discovered with the new method, was caused by water and sunlight, rather than god. Scripture said rainbows were a sign from god there would be no more great floods.
Inside the universities, of course, the basic learning model remained quite conservative; the Bible remained the be-all and end-all of Truth. Old conservative learning models based on accepting book facts carried on pretty much as they had for the past 1000 years. Naive and unquestioning young students were simply told what to believe and practice, and so real forward-looking experimental learning habits stayed weak; most people continued relying on asking god's miraculous help for solving many of their problems, especially health problems. Even in Occam’s 1300s large scale liberation from such habits was still limited and weak, as Chaucer describes a group of pilgrims going to Canterbury to pray for miraculous cures. On the way, however, he gives us a marvelous glimpse of what the newly emerging secular world felt like even to common English people. Life was definitely becoming more secular, bawdy, this-worldly, and humanistic.
The early medieval learning model received another major shock with the work of Thomas Aquinas (1225?–1275). Decades earlier, Spanish Muslim scholars had brought Aristotle's work into Europe, and soon Latin translations were made of them. It was like a new education day's dawning. Thomas would eventually use many of Aristotle's moderate ideas of sense-based learning to rebuild Augustine's old conservative Christian model based mainly on faith and the Bible. To Plato and Augustine the entire natural sense-world should be ignored as a source of eternal Truth. At best its facts were only copies of nature's real and True spirit-objects. Thus, for Thomas and eventually the Church, all learning became a combination of reasoning based on the senses, rather than just reasoning alone. At first Thomas’s work was so revolutionary it was outlawed; eventually he was canonized. It’s yet another good example of how conservatives are almost forced, from time to time, to keep modernizing their models of life and nature.
No doubt, to us today Aquinas’ educational improvements sound trivial and unimportant. Most everyone today feels confident their senses are a natural and normal part of every learning process. Back then, however, such ideas were, in fact, revolutionary and even heretical! Conservative Christians like Benedict, Gregory, and Bernard were obsessed with mystically merging and uniting completely with a spirit-world, and thus absorbing directly its knowledge. Prayer and contemplative reasoning were still the favored learning method. Most everyone believed god had put eternally true ideas in peoples’ soul-minds, and thus reasoning and mystical embrace were the best ways to know eternal Truth. The senses were merely a distraction from that goal. For them, saying any of the senses were necessary for learning any kind of reliable truth merely opened the entire evil and devil-possessed natural world to temptation and sin! However, new exploring and business arts continued creating a new learning model, based on experience and experimental testing. With new ship-building and exploring energies, for example, more and more of Western mankind was simply becoming less afraid of nature itself, just like wild animals become less afraid of people when they’re treated kindly. Soon Thomas's different sense-based learning model was accepted, in which reason and the senses played a crucially important part. Some 300 years later modern science started blooming with the help of both the senses and reasoning.
Italy Led the Way
As with every new educational movement, progress was slow during the 1200s. But even as Dante was writing his Divine Comedy describing life in the spirit-world, more liberal humanist feelings about life and nature were blooming in England, and then in Italy. No doubt, they were encouraged by the secular Medici banking family in Florence. Then, in the early 1400s, a major breakthrough happened. The young humanist Italian Renaissance movement began producing real philosophic options for people to learn and think about. Medici leaders knew how important education was for liberating people from conservative learning models, and so naturally they wanted more ancient liberal writings found; some may be still hidden away in monastery libraries throughout Europe. Luckily the Vikings wanted loot, and so left the libraries alone.
That book-finding mission was given a big boost by one Poggio Bracciolini (d. 1453; I pronounce it Pozzio Brasseolini). In his spare time he would travel northward and rummage around dusty cathedral libraries in Germany and France, looking for ancient literary treasures. Eventually he struck liberal gold; he found a rare copy (only 3 were found) of Lucretius’s atomistic poem On Nature, as well as many other ancient authors spared from Viking and barbarian torches. At first it was redd merely for its poetry, but when educated people began actually reading it for its liberal Atomistic ideas, rather than just its poetry, the entire liberal Greek Atomistic model of life and nature once again began teaching people some real philosophic options were available for study. On Nature helped fashion a more secular model of life itself, and the more it was tested, the more reliable its atomistic ideas became. Leonardo (d. 1519), Machiavelli (d. 1527), and Michelangelo (d. 1564) also became 3 more very important examples of the new humanist movement.
Leonardo was so creative he was allowed to pretty much experiment with whatever interested him most. In that process, however, he helped found the modern liberal experimental learning process. Like Aristotle before him, Aquinas used the senses merely to learn nature's already existing truths, and then reason about them. Leonardo, however, took the final step: actually testing ideas experimentally for their forward-looking results, and see how reliable they were. To him it was the best way to discover any reliable and useful fact! At both the beginning and end of a learning process, he said, our senses must be used. At first they show us what we want to learn more about, and after creating a plan then our senses again show what forward-looking results are produced! Thus, with Leonardo's help, actual future results became the new objects of knowledge, and they could be learned only with the senses, not merely contemplative reasoning. In essence, then, our best learning art was active and experimental, rather than passive and contemplative. It's really a tribute to conservative power such a passive and book-centered learning model has remained dominant in our conservative public schools to this day. They have known for centuries how destructive to their feudalistic political, economic, and educational monopolies an experimental learning model would be. It helps liberate the next generation from merely passively accepting a feudalistic and medieval status quo, wherever it exists.
No doubt, the new experimentally active learning model would have become much more widespread much sooner if Leonardo hadn't been such a private person and kept his notebooks to himself. However, it merely delayed the all but inevitable! As an entire New World was opening up in the Americas, Niccolo Machiavelli used his sense-experience to take political philosophy to a level not seen since pragmatic ancient Greek Sophists said power, both economic and military, is the only creator of right and good. Today power politics is a widely accepted idea. His Prince told would-be rulers how best to both seize and hold power. You bribe who you can and attack and weaken those you can't! It's basically the way the US system has been working for many decades now, at least since the late 1800s. For many greedy corporate leaders and conservative politicians today it's still the most useful model to keep increasing their power. And of course using art to support the status quo has been continued being another tool in the conservative kit to dampen and dilute progressive democratic improvements.
Michelangelo's nudes on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling were another example of how conservatives controlled progressive artists for their own educational aims. His nudes were too radical for conservative eyes; they might increase the desire for worldly pleasures, and thus ignore Church moral teachings. So other painters were soon hired to fig-leaf them over. And in many ways today, the visual arts have become much more controlled by conservatives, and thus less threatening. They simply support those artists who don't mind ignoring liberal ideas like equality and democracy; they often support and popularize their work with grants, commissions, and public showings. As examples we can point to the abstract, pop, and op-art movements in the 20th century, trivial TV shows controlled by a handful of large corporations, all of which are largely devoid of any critical social thinking and relevancy. Many entertain like Roman circuses. Chris Hedges' The Death of the Liberal Class goes into much more detail about controlling artists with conservative money.
Little wonder then, in the early 1500s the conservative Catholic religious monopoly was shattered. Such feelings had been growing even in the 1300s. As critical questions continued being asked with the help of curious experimenting monks like Bacon, it was merely a question of time before basic religious ideas themselves began to be questioned, thus challenging its educational model as well. For example, if salvation depended merely on faith, as Paul said, then why would religious rituals and priests be needed at all? Couldn’t people simply pray directly to god? After all, Jesus prayed directly to his god, not to his rabbi. Also, religious artwork wasn't necessary; weren't they just distractions from praying? Clearly, such protesting questions kept taking religious reasoning and education beyond conservative levels of thinking, and to a new Protestant religious movement.
Such ideas were already growing in the 1300s. Slowly, a more individual picture of religious truth grew. More liberal theologians like John Wycliff (d. 1384) in England and Jan Hus (d. 1415) in Bohemian began denying the need for priests altogether; for them each person has the right to paint their own religious picture and commune directly with their god. Even at that time theirs was a back-to-the-Bible movement, challenging the entire Catholic educational system of sacraments, rituals, and art work. Soon the new Protestant churches would have no religious statues or symbols and many different religious ideas. Religion itself was becoming more democratic. Some even rejected the Church's ideas of free will altogether, and instead opted for a theological determinism: god knew who would be saved even before the universe was created. Later liberals would ask how that idea can possibly be justified along with ideas about god's perfect goodness and mercy. How could such a god purposely condemn innocent people to eternal pain and punishment?
A few decades later much of Catholic Europe itself erupted into violence when Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation with the same kinds of questions. After all, the Bible said nothing about needing a priest for forgiveness, so why practice confession, or paying anyone to absolve one’s sins? Such ideas needn't be taught to children. Thus, the educational question about what should be taught to young folks suddenly changed in a fundamental way, along with the entire learning process as well! Religious truth moved from merely faith and trust in the Church rituals to intelligent Bible reading itself! Suddenly the art of careful reading, and learning what the Bible actually said, became more important in Protestant schools than ever before; after all, most people couldn't even read their Latin Bibles. Luther translated the Bible into German.
Thus, the new learning model of excellence said use your senses to read carefully, and also your reason to then ask more intelligent questions about what it said! Eventually modern theologians would ask, did Jesus really die to save all mankind, or was his repentance mission directed only at the Jewish community? Why did he cry out while being crucified and feel god had forsaken him? As god didn’t he already know what would happen to him? With such questions modern theology would become more concerned. In fact truth itself was becoming more personalized. In the late 1500s Edward (Shakespeare) DeVere eventually said it like this: Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so. It certainly wasn't the best model of truth; actual and real results of active testing make any idea right or wrong, but it shows how much stronger individualistic ethical ideas were growing at the time. Pleasure itself was emerging from its medieval cocoon.
No doubt, this more liberal forward-looking experimental educational model grew slowly with a series of small baby-steps, but it did go forward at the university level, and as it did also gained momentum. Finally, our modern liberal educational model of learning about life and nature with intelligent experimentation reached a critical point and began flowering in the 1600s. Around Europe curious experimenters set up little private scientific labs still forbidden in the universities, where ideas could be actively tested for their reliable results. It was as if millions of years of subconscious experimental feelings and instincts finally burst into a more conscious light of day. We live today in a world where such learning habits continue growing, but where, sadly, our public schools still largely restrict students from practicing such an active, creative, and forward-looking learning art in their own communities.
The Modern Breakthrough
With such small learning baby-steps, our most reliable and powerful experimental learning art began growing on a conscious level, rather than staying on just a subconscious behavioral level, as it had been for millions of years. In time, then, more and more educated people began accepting nature's great challenge to use their senses and creativity to help ask more intelligent questions, see more options, and then experimentally test their ideas for their future results. In that new learning system truth was something to discover, not merely something to read about and passively accept. Active experimentation began teaching young folks how life and nature actually worked, and also how such facts and knowledge could help make life better, more satisfying, and less fearful and superstitious. Soon France's secular civilization-changing Enlightenment burst into bloom.
Slowly but steadily experimental learning itself continued becoming a conscious habit-art as a more naturalistic model of life emerged from its medieval cocoon of passively accepting religious ideas on faith. That movement continued happening in both England and Italy, and education couldn’t help but be affected. In 1700s France a radical individualistic educational model was built with Jean Rousseau's Emile. It tried liberating young folks from conservative schools by saying they should study whatever they wanted. It would take many decades more to put such ideas into practice. For Rousseau, conservative schools generally trained young folks to accept the social and cultural status quo, and thus helped corrupt children’s basic natural goodness and feelings of equality; the idea helped form the Romantic Movement in the 1800s. For him conservative schools merely taught feudal and superstitious habits, and kept society divided into different tribes and classes as well as helping justify religious wars. Both Catholic and Protestant educators taught children to merely accept their ideas as the absolute Truth. Thus intolerance for different views increased. For Rousseau, to build a better and more democratic world, students needed the freedom to educate themselves, so their natural goodness could create that more just and equal democratic world.
For Dewey, however, that psychology was just too optimistic. For him children are neither naturally good nor evil; they all learn such habits only with active training, practice, and rewards. But both agreed: our schools definitely have a more active social role to play in helping build democratic habit-arts in the next generation. If not, then conservative schools will continue teaching the habits of a basically feudal society: obedience, class divisions, and passive acceptance. With such habits wars become much easier to fight and much easier for wealthy folks to continue making money. Still, many today feel Rousseau was right, and want their children to have as much educational freedom as possible; schools like Summerhill are still available today.
As we saw in the first section, building our modern more liberal democratic world based on equal rights and opportunities has been anything but a complete break with feudal schools. In fact, in many ways our conservative schools have been making it easier for such habits to continue on! Many of our modern political, economic, and educational institutions are feudalistic in nature; people today still have the power to elect only a few representatives, corporations are still run on a feudal model from the top decision-makers down to the workers, and schools still require students keep passively obeying their teachers and keep learning more book-facts. Meanwhile, our wealthy upper class and corporations continue building the kind of political and social world making it easy to keep making more money!
Not surprisingly, even in the late Middle Ages, some people aimed to build a more moderate learning model. Born in liberal Holland, for example, at first Christian Desiderius Erasmus (d. 1536), tried combining new secular humanist educational ideas with his conservative ones; they might help end brutal and vicious religious wars. Where both Descartes and Spinoza later lived, more tolerant ideas and feelings were growing as wealthy folks helped build more modern schools and international businesses. In many of them, often taught by secular-oriented teachers, all-important character habits like tolerance and respect for just laws were taught in addition to language and grammar skills. Given devastating religious warfare at the time, such tolerance was sorely needed. New canons and firearms also made stealing gold and silver from the New World's frightened and superstitious native peoples almost too easy.
Erasmus too felt much less fearful and paranoid about spirits, and more confident real knowledge and character habits could be taught, helping control peoples' destinies. He believed in free-will, rather than Protestant predestination. Thus, emphasizing a more liberal secular model of character excellence continue growing in more liberal schools; natural knowledge was ours for discovering, but using such knowledge wisely depended on one's character habits. They were also important for lowering one's fear of religious diversity, as well as feeling divided and separated from nature itself, as Christian models often taught. In short, with his help more people came to feel more Democritean rather than Augustinian. Said simply, learning new secular character habit-arts, especially political democracy and experimental science, helped more people feel more comfortable and at home in nature, and after him those feelings continued encouraging the growth of each person's individual talents. A modern liberal model of education thus continued emerging.
Another early modern baby-step might be mentioned. It was taken by John Locke (d. 1704). Like both Aristotle and Leonardo, Christian Puritan Locke too said all knowledge depended on sense experience. Eventually such ideas helped Charles Darwin (d. 1882) research his naturalistic ideas on a 5 year voyage, and eventually publish his Origin of Species and Descent of Man. They all but sealed the door on conservative models of life, nature, and education. His work encouraged people to see both learning and human life as completely within natural forces, just as liberal Democritus and the Atomists had done thousands of years earlier! Such re-born liberal ideas thus became a real alternative to a conservative education, helping liberate students from obedience to their conservative teachers and increasing democratic habits and feelings for equal rights. Thus modern liberal education itself became more of a naturalistic art and science. In the next section we'll see a few more of its modern highlights.
4. EDUCATIONAL HIGHLIGHTS: MODERN
Our Modern World Emerges
No doubt, the most important modern educational improvement was the habit-art of testing ideas experimentally. As our modern age continued emerging, experimental testing became the most powerful learning art for secular-minded people. For example, as conservatives like Rene Descartes (d. 1649) and materialists like Thomas Hobbes (d. 1679) continued using reason as the best learning method, experimental testing was growing with the help of people like Francis Bacon (d. 1626). He talked about its basic ideas and power for turning anyone into a kind of knowledge matador, useful for slaying much of the mythical and superstitious bulls still living; they were fed on what someone else said was true. And most importantly of all, he also said such new experimental facts should be used to liberate all of mankind from poverty, disease, and ignorance. He was one of Dewey’s favorite writers and was called almost the perfect example of the growing humanist movement.
During the 1500s, 3 other major movements continued weakening the medieval philosophic and educational models. They were religious Reformation, the humanistic Renaissance, and world exploration. After Isaac Newton (1727) demonstrated science’s power to see all of nature as governed by its own self-operating 'laws', it seemed as if the modern world’s medieval bullfight with feudalistic systems had finally turned a crucially important corner. To many educated people, experimental testing was rapidly building an entirely new set of natural facts, useful in both science and education. The new, more powerful, experimental learning art not only discovered useful and reliable facts, but also allowed people to become their own learning master, and thus guide their own individual growth! Learning itself became democratized in the many small personal research labs growing outside the universities. Anyone could experiment with their own ideas; the challenge was to make such learning intelligent, rather than routine. The new experimental learning art also began affecting political democratic thinking as well.
For example, after England's Glorious Revolution of 1688, political thinkers like John Locke experimented with building a Bill of Rights for all citizens, thus helping nurture democracy's growth. Enforcing such rights then became the state's new responsibility, of which education was one. Thus science’s more powerful experimental learning art began challenging feudalistic conservatives as never before. Not even in ancient Greece was the modern liberal democratic movement so strong. And, as the still more secular 1700's Enlightenment unfolded across western Europe, more and more progressive matadors wanted modern science to give conservative education its final coup de grace.
With such feelings education itself became more of a naturalistic art and science; what can children learn and when's the best time to teach them such facts? And so our modern studies of child psychology began growing. Hopes were so high in France, many liberal philosophes there were certain people learn all their ideas beginning in childhood, and so unlimited social progress towards equality was possible after building the right institutions, schools included. For them, at least in theory, humankind could keep improving with better schools and learning better habit-arts as life and nature kept changing. Education itself thus continued becoming a very important part for any kind of human progress. In many ways Dewey felt the same optimism, especially during the Progressive Era in the early 1900s. The only thing standing in the way of building more improved liberal schools was undereducated parents, feudalistic conservatives, and of course teachers who really didn't want to build more democratic schools. Many of them preferred to keep control students in their seats and working on an endless stream of book-assignments, even though the large majority would never even graduate high school, much less go to college.
Early Modern Models of Education
Naturally, early in the 1600s many people had both conservative and modern habits, like Aristotle too had in ancient Athens. As we saw earlier Erasmus was another such writer. Thus, his educational model included both liberal humanist and conservative religious ideas. He certainly wasn't alone. In fact, in the conservative philosophic work of Descartes, Spinoza (d. 1677), and Leibniz (d. 1716), they too built more modern models of life and nature while using the old conservative learning method of mere contemplation and logical reasoning. To them, and to Plato and Aristotle, experimental learning simply couldn't produce the kind of eternal and unchanging knowledge they wanted to see.
In Holland too, during the 1500s, liberal social and religious habits of tolerance were already growing; their more peaceful results helped make life safer for everyone. In 1492 it even welcomed Jews expelled from Spain, Spinoza’s ancestors included. Thus, for such early modern humanists, liberal habits of character excellence, like tolerance, were stressed in schools, in addition to learning reading, writing, and grammar skills. Said Erasmus: “…I … tried … to raise … young people from … ignorance to pure studies.” For him “learning should promote the seeds of piety … love … the liberal studies … the duties of life … and good manners.” In other words, a modern liberal model of education was emerging, involving knowledge, skills, and character training. As they did, then, conservative habits of seeing one's truth as the eternal and only Truth kept growing weaker.
Even though Erasmus said Latin should still be the language of all educated Europeans, he also suggested a much more naturalistic and playful method of learning, rather than mere passive and contemplative book study. His more liberal learning ideas told him games and speaking activities would do more to teach grace and grammar than all the books about them. It was another early example of behavioral learning methods; children best learn what they practice, not what they merely read. Character habits like tolerance for peaceful people were sorely needed as the Reformation was just getting underway and of course religious wars continued needlessly wasting both lives and money. In 1572, for example, Catholics in Paris murdered Protestant leaders in cold blood, ordered by King Charles 2 himself and his mother, Catherine de Medici.
However, Erasmus’s moderate educational model still had 2 important weaknesses. It not only neglected experimental learning for producing our strongest knowledge, but it also left the lower classes out of the educational picture. As a result, a medieval class structure continued on, rather than a more democratic one. Even though he knew about the new experimental learning art and its testing method of discovering useful and reliable natural facts, he still ignored it in favor of teaching classical Latin and Greek literature as the main subjects. And of course, ignoring the lower classes and not teaching them creative and inventive habits helped keep them in the lower classes, thus making democratic progress much less than what it could have been!
Greater sea explorations than even the Vikings also played a great part in breaking the old medieval fear of the natural world, thus making experimental learning our most important learning tool. Within a growing dynamic, expanding, and energetic Renaissance world, it was only a question of time before such sea voyages became yet another sign of Western Europe's growing confidence about how to actively learn more about our natural world, and thus more easily keep improving it for the public good.
No doubt, there were both good and bad results from those voyages, depending, of course, on whether conservatives or liberals were defining the public good. On the liberal side, such explorations continued building the feeling for our world as governed by natural laws, rather than supernatural spirits. In fact, many US Founders in the 1700s were deists; a solitary god cared nothing for our natural world and basically contemplated its own ideas. On the bad side, however, armed with new canons and firearms, brutal warfare with Stone Age natives resulted in thousands being killed as their gold and silver was simply looted and stolen. Some of it would help pay Michelangelo for painting the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. It was yet another bad omen of how important money was becoming to greedy people. To this day that habit-art continues corrupting our political and economic institutions. Even Plato saw the socially corrosive results of such habits.
Education reform also was helped by the Protestant Reformation. Some of Martin Luther’s educational ideas are enlightening to see. As Germany became more and more Protestant, many of the Catholic schools ceased to exist, and so Luther quickly felt the need to build a new educational model based on his more individualistic religious ideas. Without such a model he knew people would keep practicing Catholic habits and rituals. He thus wrote a number of new educational catechisms and spent a year translating the New Testament into German, so people could read it for themselves and see why he criticized Catholicism's model.
He also took another very important educational baby-step. He began talking about an idea we keep practicing to this day: state sponsored universal compulsory education, for both boys and girls of all classes! Even in the early 1500s he was still much more of a democrat than Erasmus. It was as if the old German hatred of Rome suddenly found yet another justification for rejecting its religious ideas! Only a more educated society could more easily keep practicing more enlightened religious ideas. So in place of a feudal school system run from Rome, Luther substituted a more individualistic secular school system, each run by the local German prince, of which there were hundreds.
However, just as today, he soon faced another major problem – financing. With people still divided into great medieval extremes of rich and poor, and having almost no extra money to finance such schools, how could local princes build such a system? Most everyone were still poor subsistence farmers and peasants living from one growing season to the next. If nothing else, however, Luther was creative. Eventually, he simply suggested children go to school only for a couple hours a day, then go home and learn some of the practical farm skills they needed to keep their princes fed and clothed! Thus, with his help, the modern idea of universal public education continued growing in Europe.
Another Protestant reformer named John Calvin (d. 1654) agreed; both boys and girls should be educated. The logic was plain enough: Why waste precious human potential by not educating as many as possible, including women? After all, what has gender got to do with having a sharp brain? Medieval habits, however, showed how difficult it was to make a complete break with them. Both sexes should still be educated, but again in a Christian framework; the basic Christian character habits of faith, hope, and love would strengthen young folks against what he still felt were devils working to corrupt uneducated people, like Luther believed had happened to Catholic leaders in Rome. In spite of it, both of them felt one of modern education's important practical ideas: educating all young folks was the best way for any nation to more intelligently control its own growth and destiny. Dewey of course agreed, but disagreed with them about education's other 2 major questions: what should students be taught, as well as how they should learn their habits and ideas.
Practical Education
A few decades after Luther, other liberal German educators also encouraged universal education for both boys and girls, as well as playing useful educational games. They added, however, yet another important piece of the modern progressive educational movement -- occupational training. It remains an important part of German education to this day. The industrial revolution was just beginning, and they sensed education's role in training the next generation. Excellent learning itself was becoming more humanized and practical, as well as actively economically oriented, rather than remaining passively book-centered, even for younger children. People like Jean Rousseau and Heinrich Pestalozzi (d. 1827) said children need active and experimental learning.
Character training thus continued growing in Swiss schools even before 1800. What's more, Pestalozzi was one of the first to see Hume's old faculty psychology needing re-thinking, making it a more developmental and evolutionary model, rather than just treating young folks as having a weak set of fixed adult faculties. He was also more educationally more democratic too. He saw children have different interests and wanting to learn different ideas, and so it was counterproductive to group everyone in classes and teach them the same subjects; it only produced more discipline problems for teachers. For him such education was seen as having very important social results too, some darker than others. Germany, for example, was becoming a more unified nation, and so what rights and duties should children have in the new nation? Should the state be able to draft them to fight its wars, as Napoleon had done in the early 1800s, or should people have the freedom to choose when to endanger their lives? And so another very important question in modern education became, where exactly is the line between student rights and social duties? Conservatives, of course, wanted as much control over citizens as they could possibly have.
So, with the growth of democracy and public school systems, educational philosophy itself became a more important study, as it was for Plato. For many modern educators a number of new questions needed to be answered. How can we balance the 2 goals of teaching individual rights as well as social responsibility? What subjects should we teach young folks? What should the school curriculum be? Should they be taught merely book facts, military habits like the ancient Spartans had done, business skills for the emerging corporate world, character excellence, or what? What is educational excellence?
Also important was this question: How much individual freedom should students have in public schools, none, little, or much? In other words, where does student individual liberty end and state security begin? Does the state have an eternal right to make citizens fight all its wars? What role in education should the state have? Should it educate students to always obey it, or should that power be given to local and regional governments? Exactly what educational freedoms do students and the state have, and when should they be taught to students? Naturally conservatives like George Hegel (d. 1832) felt people owed the state complete obedience, while liberal democrats, and the newly evolving Libertarian political model of small government, felt individual rights were more important than any state. Only such individual freedom could help control any state from becoming yet another form of totalitarian tyranny.
Still, as the Industrial Revolution was growing, the 1830s were a time of new educational experiments. In France, for example, many independent and well-redd women began rejecting Rousseau’s male chauvinism and began writing about women’s education; why waste half of our human potential for excellence, especially at the university level? They knew some women are even smarter than most men, like, for example, Emilie du Chatelet (d. 1749). Even though she was denied a university education, she educated herself, eventually even correcting some of Newton’s scientific mistakes, and damn near discovered Einstein’s famous E = mc2 equation on her own! To this day she remains virtually unknown to most everyone.
Other new educational experiments were tried too. In Germany’s 1840s, for example, new ideas like kindergartens were tested. People began seeing the learning potential even in 5 year olds! They wanted to see if enjoyable sense-based games and songs really make children better learners in school, and often they did! Also educationally active at this time in Scotland was the great English humanist and Socialist Robert Owen. He had great success organizing a village school for children in the town where he ran a successful cloth-making factory. He thus quickly embraced Enlightenment educational optimism: all personal and social limitations can be expanding and improving with better educated children. With his help sending children to school rather than into a factory made life much easier and less stressful; the problem, however, was the limited small scale of his reforms. Even though he too celebrated the progressive idea of free universal education for all, most industrialists didn't, and, with the help of child workers, turned many English towns into polluted centers of cramped and expensive living.
Like Dewey, Owen saw education as the key to keep intelligently rebuilding old feudalistic antidemocratic habits of passive obedience to the status quo with the help of progressive and student-centered schools. And, of course, both wanted the government to become more active in that educational process. Without the government's help, conservative-run schools would continue teaching students local kinds of conservative habits, and thus making democracy even more difficult to grow. More corporate profit-conscious Britons wanted more freedom to keep making as much money as possible, while paying their workers as little as possible. Thus, to them, helping grow democratic feelings for equal rights should be ignored. Herbert Spencer (d. 1903) represented such a hard-hearted aristocratic social model. To him most people were naturally inferior, so why should the government bother educating or caring for them at all? Like Plato, many modern conservatives too often felt education should be confined to the upper and middle classes; if not, then democracy would keep growing and their power would keep shrinking. Radical laissez-faire thinkers like Spencer, who invented the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, said it would be useless to educate those whom nature had marked for early death and extinction. Thus, for him, the government shouldn't interfere with the natural processes of survival going on all around us. Life itself should be allowed to keep selecting the fittest to keep living without government interference. Such conservative and libertarian educational ideas went against almost all kinds of liberal government help for the poor, even if it made factories safer and old age easier. Such libertarian conservatives believed the government should keep helping make the wealthy even wealthier. Such ideas are still heard today, though perhaps not as openly as before! People have grown more hostile to such ideas since Spencer's day, and feel the government should play a bigger role in building a more democratic public good. Many today feel those who have obscene amounts of money should pay more for the privilege. As C. Wright Mills writes in The Power Elite about such conservatives:
"... People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves. ... the idea ... of having a finer moral character is an ideology of the elite as a privileged ruling stratum ... " (14)
Modern conservative ideas were often justified with Germany’s George Hegel (d. 1832) and his political ideas. For a while even Dewey himself was an Hegelian early in his teaching career. For Hegel, states were god’s tools for guiding life itself! Thus only the state can give people all their freedoms, liberties, and true individuality, and as a result it has the ultimate power over citizens, even the right to force people to die for it. In other words, the state was much more important than any individual democratic rights people might have; like Plato before him, democracy was a dangerous political habit to teach. It only encouraged feelings of equal rights and individualism. Like Plato, he wanted students conditioned to obey and support their national leaders more than anything else; the state itself was the source of all individual liberties and freedoms, and so students must learn to defend it always and unquestioningly, no matter what it did! For feudal obedience to the Church, Hegel thus substituted feudal obedience to the nation. For conservatives like him even today, the feeling was ‘my country, right or wrong’; whatever the state did, it deserved obedience; it was god's work itself! Instead of working together with atheistic communist governments, the Cold War was completely justified, Vietnam included. In the 1930s Adolph Hitler continued practicing Hegel’s ideas within his Nazi Party; people owed everything to the state.
Democratic liberals, however, had a very different feeling about the state's power. If the country is wrong about some idea or policy, then citizens have a duty to make it right. In many ways Deweyan liberals and Hegelian conservatives are still defined with those ideas today. Liberals today ask why shouldn't all people have the right to choose what wars to fight, how much their tax-supported government should spy on them, or even decide what their taxes should be used for? If not, then the result is yet another feudalistic government doing whatever wealthy folks want it to do, much like the US today in many ways. Many conservatives today continue working to take more and more of the public’s tax money, much of it in the name of national security.
Slowly, as great differences in educational models became defined, more practical questions were asked. How many days and years should young folks be compelled to go to school, and study what they’re told to study? How practical and work-oriented should public education be? Should all students be required to study world history, English literature, and geometry while not learning useful and employable skills, like intelligent work and character habits? No doubt Dewey and also President Franklin Roosevelt (d. 1945) wanted young folks learning some practical skills in school, not only in vocational schools but also in all public schools. During the Great Depression FDR wanted to keep teaching people useful work skills with job programs like the Civilian Conservation Corp and the National Youth Administration. In fact, some poor young folks were paid for some work while still going to school, much like today where many European schools have apprenticeship work programs for students. Such programs help lower unemployment rates among young folks, which normally are often much higher than other age groups. Many educators even today also talk about a national 2-year service requirement after high school, so students can get some real world experience before college, so they can better challenge their professors, rather than meekly keep accepting what they were told. Learning more about both conservative and liberal models of life and nature would thus make college a more intellectually meaningful experience.
Naturally, many US conservatives and libertarians were against giving the national government much educational power. After all, the Constitution said nothing about such federal power, and so it should be controlled by the states, as local politicians wanted. Liberals of course saw many weaknesses in that kind of school system. For example, even after the Civil War, many conservatives didn't want former African slaves educated at all; for them it would produce social and economic chaos, making good jobs less scarce. As a result of such locally controlled segregated educational systems, it was easy to keep conservative racial prejudices in place, and even terrorize Africans who wanted all the rights whites already had, especially voting rights. So, Africans and liberals were challenged to help build schools where such students could get a good education; one result was Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
What's more, as regular economic meltdowns like the Great Depression kept throwing social life for all poor folks into stressful chaos, more and more liberals wanted the Federal government to start playing a larger educational role. To them capitalism's eternal quest for ever greater profits seemed unable to keep educating everyone to practice intelligent democratic habits. In the 1930s, then, government became a larger tool for helping create more equal opportunities. In the 1940s, for example, the military began integrating the races. The liberal idea was local control of schools could no longer be trusted to keep expanding the public good and making life more democratic for everyone. The growth of income taxes gave liberal politicians the power to take a more active role in education and in peoples’ lives in general. Conservatives and libertarians, on the other hand, continued fighting that power with their laissez-faire political and economic ideas.
Early US Highlights
In the 1600s so-called Latin Grammar Schools were started in the colonies to help train more male clergymen, lawyers, and public servants. Feudally religious ideas of inequality allowed only boys to study reading, writing, and elementary math, as well as learn how to speak and write both Latin and Greek. Latin was useful for lawyers, and Greek for ministers. And in Puritan-founded Harvard, teenage boys were required to have such skills before entering.
Before independence in 1776, 9 religious controlled colleges were working in the American colonies; one Virginia school named for British rulers William and Mary taught Thomas Jefferson (d. 1826), but, a year before he died, epicurean Jefferson finally saw his own secular University of Virginia open with a little over 100 students. There, character habits were important, and eventually a code of honor was built for students. Excellent character habits like honesty were practiced in action, and students themselves made sure others acted the same way by reporting cheaters and liars to a student government, much like our military academies do today. Such honor codes no doubt continue to this day, if not openly then underground. Whether conservative or liberal, however, character excellence was still an important habit-art to learn, and the younger the better. People saw life itself is easier when honesty and lawfulness are respected, and so wanted their children learning such habits.
As with so many other new nations, US public schools continued growing during the 1800s. As the government gave federal land to the states they sold much of it and used the money to build schools. Often such schools were practical, and emphasized agricultural research. The Industrial Revolution was just beginning and so farming was still what most people did; agriculture thus became the economy’s base, especially cotton-growing in the South. Texas Agricultural and Mining University (Texas A & M) is one example of such a school. Eventually many such state colleges would evolve into state universities. Through it all, however, the 3 main educational questions remained important: what should students be taught; how should they be taught; and how much freedom should students have to study what they want? Sadly, however, almost no one was asking if even primary age students should be free to study what they want. Most everyone took it for granted they should be regimented to passively keep obeying their teachers and working on book-assignments? Because mostly conservative educators continued controlling their public schools, student freedom remained small and confined. After all, habits off obedience were useful to those controlling our corporations and military services; they made union organizing more difficult, as well as demanding a larger share of corporate profits.
Early in the 1800s, however, another famous American educator, Horace Mann (d. 1859) gained some fame as Boards of Education were growing in states. Mann became Massachusetts’s education leader and worked to make subjects more secular and useful in the schools, rather than merely religious; feudal religious habits were thus becoming less powerful with the growth of Mann’s ideas. He also began experimenting with what today are called ‘normal’ teacher colleges, where young folks are trained to be teachers. After all, the more educated they are about their art and students, the better prepared they are to teach useful skills and ideas. Also, around that time, so-called Transcendentalists like Bronson Alcott (d. 1888) began experimenting educationally. He was dedicated to equality, vegetarianism, and animal-rights, opening several short-lived schools himself. He too saw enjoyable work-play activities like singing, dancing, art, and music as the best and most natural way for young children to feel how much fun learning can be. Eventually his daughter Louisa May (d. 1888) would help get the family out of poverty with her popular writings, especially Little Women, and Little Men.
Then, after the Civil War, Dewey's liberal progressive school movement began growing stronger with help from men like Francis Parker (d. 1902), known to many as the father of US progressive education based on democratic equality for all. For example, he began getting some good learning results by experimenting with a less formal seat-row structured classroom the Grammar schools had been practicing for centuries. It too helped make learning more natural rather than book-centered. In fact, Parker worked with Dewey at the University of Chicago in the late 1890s, as Dewey began experimenting with his own famous Lab School. There he tested different ideas about what children can know, what they should learn, and how they should learn it. There he became firmly convinced an active intelligent experimental learning method was best.
After earning his BA at the University of Vermont, Dewey did some high school teaching in Oil City, Pennsylvania in 1881. There he saw for himself how unnatural and artificial the conservative educational book-centered model was, and how students quickly became bored with it, and causing discipline problems as well. Many students simply didn't need to know all the facts college education professors said they should know. What's more, the book-facts they were learning were separated from any kind of practical use, making divorcing learning from the feeling half of our body-mind. In such schools knowledge was thus merely intellectual, rather than given much feeling-depth.
Dewey certainly wasn't alone. Many newly freed African educators too were feeling the same kinds of results. Booker T. Washington (d. 1915) was one of them. With a dedicated group of Northern and local backers, he also included student work projects like helping build the school itself, almost from the ground up -- the Tuskegee Normal School. There, future African teachers like himself would be trained, but with more practical kinds of knowledge and skills. His progressive school emphasized practical work-related learning as well as academic class work. Students also learned intelligent kinds of health habits, like dental care; they were made to carry a toothbrush and keep their teeth clean on a daily basis; it was part of their practical character training. Even his own son would eventually become an expert brick-maker, helping build many of the institute’s buildings on an abandoned plantation wealthy northern white folks helped him buy. He also had help from supportive white Alabama legislators, trading their help for African votes at election time. His is indeed an inspiring educational story for anyone interested in progressive education models. Eventually Dewey became one of the movement’s most famous leaders. In the early 1900s he even traveled to China, Japan, and Turkey to make educational suggestions.
With his help progressive liberals began feeling another major weakness in conservative book-centered schools. As time went on and more public school systems were built, the all-important study of democratic habits and skills was almost completely ignored, except of course at some of the better private schools, to which wealthy folks normally sent their children. Thus most public schools continued ignoring the skills most useful in a democratic republic, like voting, and making their own neighborhoods more equal for everyone. In those kinds of conservative schools learning remained focused on merely memorizing more academic book-facts and test taking. In such schools democratic habits themselves remained weak. What’s more, students weren't formally taught the art of feeling how such facts and knowledge could be used to keep improving life both inside and outside of school. Thus most students remained passive and accepting – the main habits practiced by the masses for thousands of years. So again, the lack of constructive feelings made learning more mental than anything else. Building constructive and helpful social democratic character habits was generally ignored -- the most important part of any democratic learning experience! And on top of all that, such book-facts were quickly forgotten. How many people today remember how to solve a quadratic equation, or what such math knowledge can be used for, or remember the names of US presidents, or how to build community gardens or public parks?
In the early 1900s conservative and liberal educational models became more distinct and defined, thanks to Dewey’s work. More and more people wanted their schools to teach more progressive democratic and practical habits. More people demanded more political power to weaken conservative control, helping pass an amendment to elect senators directly. Also, more liberals began seeing how many of our serious social problems like crime and drug abuse were encouraged by keeping our conservative book-centered schools in place. Without teaching more useful democratic character habits, like how to enjoy respecting our just laws and other peoples’ equal rights, how to intelligently guide one’s own educational growth, and intelligently enjoy life itself, a conservative book-centered model kept helping produce many less than excellent social results.
Another weak result for conservative book-oriented schools was this: they encouraged young folks to keep depending on adults for what they learned, rather than build their own habits of independent and intelligent thinking. In other words, studying only what the teacher told them to study promoted a dependent we'll-take-care-of-you feeling in students, as they're given books, pencils, and even questions to answer. Thus dependence was encouraged, rather than independence and character development, thus encouraging a welfare state itself to evolve. How else was the great wealth of the upper class to be counterbalanced and checked unless they paid their fair share in taxes? Thus, the more dependent students became on teachers, the more they needed to rely on the government to make life better.
No doubt, Dewey wanted teachers involved in an educational process, but their role should be very different from merely handing out book assignments, grading tests, and giving grades. Such work in fact helps keep students overly dependent, passive, immature, and unintelligent. They were the habits produced for much of the medieval period, and for thousands of years before that. Instead, they should help children know how their own habits can become more intelligent, how they might improve their schools and neighborhoods, and also suggest intelligent ideas to help them build some plans to accomplish those goals. How else can the ultimate goal of excellent education itself, intelligent self-guidance, be best accomplished? Without such liberals schools they remain largely focused on finding the few students who have good memories, and pretty much neglect everyone else. In them our economic classes remain the status quo.
Based on such weak, unhealthful, and undemocratic results, Dewey felt completely justified in creating a more naturalistic, democratic, and progressive educational model, where schools helped students learn more about their own bodies and how to keep them healthy, learning what intelligent experimental learning feels like, and how to use in and out of school. For him, schools should have a number of constructive shops where students could learn how to keep intelligently building a better world, just like in the real world.
Moreover, with such schools useful academic facts wouldn't be ignored, but rather learned naturally with constructive projects, including math, science, literature, and history facts. For Dewey, tools like microscopes, telescopes, and computers were best used to help students learn how to keep improving themselves, their schools, and their communities. Learning to use ideas intelligently was the key to building excellent character habits as well, rather than depending on the government more than was necessary. Why shouldn’t students learn how to intelligently run a school democratically, allow some students to create businesses, elect a government to help regulate them for everyone’s good, and learn to judge their student representatives by their constructive and helpful actions? Isn’t that what adults do in the real world? It's a modern educational challenge still existing today, simply because conservatives still largely control what the next generation is learning in their schools. Without such progressively liberal democratic schools our nation continues seeing roughly half the population continue acting passively and acceptingly as political and economic control keep growing for a few wealthy folks; many seem addicted to making and keeping as much money as they can.
Are such weak and unhealthful democratic results really impossible to improve? Certainly not for Dewey. What he brought to the progressive education movement was the new Behaviorist psychology. All such human habits, including conservative greedy ones, are merely the result of practice. If students keep practicing more intelligent democratic habits, then they will grow stronger in time. Conservatives have known that fact for thousands of years, and have used religious ideas to convince people they are the eternal Truth and so should be accepted and supported. As the opening quotes show, even Aristotle knew children learn their habits actively, not just with reasoning, and should be taught religious habits as well. For liberal Dewey, however, different habits simply create different kinds of will power, and democratic habits are the best way to make life better for everyone, not just for a few.
The Russian Experiment
Dewey’s liberal educational model was already growing around the country when Russia’s 1917 revolution erupted. Naturally, as new schools were built there he was interested in what they were doing, and so about 10 years after the revolution he went there himself. No doubt, Communist Party members were eager to show him some of their more progressive schools. If he liked what he saw he might give them some good publicity. Naturally they allowed him to see only what they wanted him to see, and he did write some positive things about such schools; they were already growing in many parts of the US as well, like throughout the Gary, Indiana district. In some Russian schools he saw children regularly going out into their world to learn more about it, make natural collections, and also use their knowledge to make peoples’ lives better. After all, most everyone there was still an uneducated peasant. Helpful character excellence was thus encouraged in such schools. Of course they still existed on a very limited scale, but what he saw he often liked.
"... the ‘school of work’ was quite central in post-revolutionary school undertakings. And a main feature was that, while productive work is educative par excellence, it must be taken in a broad social sense, and as a means of creating a social new order and not simply as an accommodation to the existing (feudalistic) economic regime.
I can only pay my tribute to the liberating effect of active participation in social life upon the attitude of students. Those whom I met had a vitality and a kind of confidence in life; that afforded one of the more stimulating experiences of my life. …a boy of fourteen wrote upon the back of a painting he presented me; the picture was given in memory of the ‘school that opened my eyes.’ ...
The primary principle of method officially laid down is that, in every topic, work by pupils is to begin with observation of their own environment, natural and social. (The best museum of natural and social materials for pedagogical purposes I have ever seen is in a country district outside of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), constructed on the basis of a complete exhibit of local fauna, flora, mineralogy, etc, and local antiquities and history, made by pupils from excursions under the direction of their teacher.) ...
To them, an educative project(‘s) value is its contribution to some socially useful work. In general, they include contributions to improvement of sanitation and hygienic conditions, … assisting in the campaign against illiteracy; reading newspapers and books to the illiterate, helping in clubs, excursions … with younger children; assisting ignorant adults to understand the policies of local soviets so that they can take part in them intelligently; engaging in Communist propaganda, and, on the industrial side, taking some part in a multitude of diverse activities calculated to improve economic conditions. (Later Works, v. 3, 224-239; additions my own)
No doubt, with such thoughts many today would feel Dewey himself was really a communist, so why believe anything he said about conservative American schools? Of course he would like what he saw in Russia. But in fact, he was neither a Marxist nor a communist; he was a liberal democrat who supported Fabian socialism. For him, if enough people democratically wanted to experiment with progressive educational ideas, then it should go forward. Such experimentation was the life blood of making it easier for people to keep intelligently adjusting their habits in an always moving nature where wealthy folks have great advantages over others.
In short, the people should be free to experiment with any institution a majority want to experiment with, including their schools. For him, anywhere progressive schools produce a more healthful and intelligent public was to be celebrated, whether in Russia, China, Japan, Africa, or the US. After all, Gary’s progressive education system was already about 20 years old when Dewey went to Russia! What he objected to, however, were schools where young folks were trained not ask any questions, not try to improve either their schools or their neighborhoods, keep ignoring how the economic, political, and social status quo operates, and especially keep hateful racial actions in place. For Dewey, liberal progressive schools are better simply because of the more helpful democratic habit-arts they teach, whether in Russia or the US!
After Dewey’s Russian trip, however, schools there became more conservative, no doubt on Stalin's orders; he too had a liberal democratic opposition to wipe out, and also a rural nation to modernize, not to mention an aristocracy to eliminate. Thus more and more Russian schools reverted back to conservative Western methods of teacher and book-centered education. Students were made to feel the Communist Party already knew the eternal Truth and so there was no need for anyone to question anything about their studies. Thus learning once again became anchored mainly to finding students who were better at rote memorization of approved ideas and facts, as well as the uncritical and unimaginative obedience to their teachers. In effect, then, Russian schools became more Platonic, educating the next generation to merely accept the elite ruling Communist class. With such actions Hegel’s educational ideas lived. The all-important habits of personal intelligence and democratic character skills like equal rights were simply neglected; obedience was demanded to the official Communist ideology, minimizing dissent and convincing every one of its eternal and unchanging Truth! In effect, then, their schools too became merely a secular version of medieval religious schools. Indeed, monopolistic political, economic, and educational power seems to be at least as addictive as heroin; the more you have, the more you want. For liberal like Dewey, intelligent democratic habits were the best antidote to such psychic feudalistic poison.
Here, however, is another irony worthy of Socrates himself. In the 1800s Marx boasted capitalism bore the seeds of its own destruction; for him greedy capitalists would keep controlling the government, the economy, and the schools and thus keep getting wealthier while most everyone else was kept poor and ignorant. Eventually the workers would revolt and start building a more equal society. To him unregulated capitalism was feudalistic and selfish, rather than liberating and democratic. As both 20th century and recent history teaches us, such ideas have some truth in them.
So, where's the irony? Well, about ten years after the Russian Revolution in 1917, many schools returned to using conservative educational methods, the seeds of which came from Western culture. Students were given books to read while teachers kept looking for those few students with good memories. Eventually, however, in the late 1980s, its economy imploded for a number of reasons, education being one of them. The less the next generation is taught how to keep improving their world, the more unstable life becomes. Be careful of the seeds we plant; they may become poisonous plants.
Is Russian and US alcoholism yet another unhealthful result of conservative schools? Long cold boring Russian winters, and the new stresses of city life, like cramped housing, can be very depressing, especially if one doesn’t have enjoyably creative and constructive habits to practice. What else is one to do during 7-month long Arctic winters besides drink? Ignoring teaching young folks how to enjoy using their time constructively thus helps keep such weaknesses in place. Today we're seeing yet more self-destructive results of not teaching students about physical and mental health; there’s been an alarming increase in both child and adult obesity, and its destructive health results. Eating has become a way for many people to forget about their problems and take a nap instead.
More About Dewey's Liberal Education Model
Born in liberal Vermont, Dewey lived through the US Progressive Movement at the height of its power in the early 1900s. Beginning in the 1880s he didn't hesitate to question more and more of his conservative Christian and Hegelian ideas. Slowly, many of them he rejected as he saw an industrial world blossom around him, with all its poverty and labor problems. He also saw a liberal progressive democratic movement grow stronger. Much of the nation was reacting against the conservative feudalistic status quo; he even voted for Teddy Roosevelt in 1904, just after he began teaching at Columbia, in New York. There too he felt the dominant conservative education model simply made it easier for conservatives to keep their status quo in place.
What's more, in the early 1900s millions of poor and undereducated immigrants were flooding into the country and they needed to know how to intelligently experiment with their new democratic power; most of them had no such power in Europe. He knew only such democratic power could best keep transforming still-feudal conservative systems into a more democratic nation. And the movement’s great democratic achievements in the 1910s only added to his confidence about democracy itself, so why shouldn’t our public schools become more liberal and progressive? His important book Democracy and Education (1916) showed how more liberal schools could finally meet the on-going democratic challenge to keep teaching the next generation such important character habits and ideas like equal rights for all. Soon hundreds of schools around the country were experimenting with more liberal kinds of educational ideas.
Slowly, however, such schools gradually reverted to the old conservative book-centered model as first the Great Depression greatly reduced education money, and World War 2 kept that reality in place. Again, conservatives knew full well, their feudalistic systems just would not work the way they wanted if people learned democratic habits of equality and equal rights, and made the government keep regulating corporations for the public good. In the 1920s the chairman of General Electric said the government should let the economy run on its own. Such conservatives just didn’t want to imagine the much different world we'd have today if soldiers and workers demanded and got their democratic equal rights? Corporate CEOs, for example, just wouldn't be paid million dollar salaries while their workers were paid just enough to live on, and sometimes not even that!
No doubt, Dewey would agree both parents and those studying to be teachers shouldn’t just assume the next generation will be getting an excellent education merely because the schools look new and modern. Progressive parents and young teachers should get more involved in building more progressive schools; they should not only teach themselves what their kids are learning, but also how they're learning it! Are students learning important kinds of character habits like physical and mental health, and building them actively, or are they merely learning more and more academic facts? Are they merely learning habits of passive obedience, or are they also learning how to actively use their knowledge intelligently and experimentally in their schools and neighborhoods? If not, then why should parents, students, and young teachers merely accept a conservative education model? Democracy's health and strength, as well as personal health and growth, are best learned with much different kinds of learning projects? Talk as critically of democracy in the US as you please, and say all the ways its weak and unhealthful, but the fact remains: Only when enough people demand improvements, will both schools and governments become more democratic and liberally progressive. And the more that happens, the easier it becomes for more workers to demand more democratic decision-making power on their corporation’s board of directors, as well as demand a greater share of huge profits many of our corporations are making these days! In short, for Dewey there is an intimate and close organic relationship between education and peoples' general social lives. The one can make important improvements in all other systems.
To Dewey, another conservative educational weakness seemed obvious. Because no one can ever know all academic facts, and because we live in a continually changing world, a truly educated person learns the art of knowing HOW TO RAPIDLY FIND AND WISELY USE facts and information to solve both their own personal and social problems! To put it plainly, learning how to learn is much more important than merely learning a lot of academic facts. Thus, learning how best to learn is the most important skill we should be teaching young folks. Over 2 million years ago, from the first little stone toolmaker to this day, intelligently and actively learning new facts, and then using them kindly and thoughtfully is true liberal educational gold. So, the more students actively practice how to keep joyfully and constructively experimenting with their world, the less need they're have to keep numbing or hyping themselves up with drugs and stimulants, and the more life will be improved.
Needless to say, the evolution of such liberal democratic schools is still a great challenge for both parents, students, and young teachers. Such liberal models of education are barely over a hundred years old, while conservative systems have been in place for centuries, and have become even more dominant in the US during the last 40 years. The wealthy have become much wealthier and so have even more power to support conservative politicians who mostly want teacher unions broken up by building a second kind of school system, called Charter schools. It’s ok to break the public school monopoly, but it’s certainly not ok to break up economic or political monopolies.
In Dewey's liberal educational model, character habits again are elevated to the importance they had for many educators down through history; the main different between him and them is the democratic and healthful nature of those habits. Together with actively experimenting with useful knowledge and skills, healthy democratic character habits make up his 3-fold liberal educational foundation. In general it’s learning skills like how to respect all law-abiding people, and work for their equal rights. Our world still has millions of people believing only their own personal or religious habits are eternal and unchanging Truth, and so feel justified in even forcing others to obey or drive them away. For example, those conservatives who are against giving women the freedom to control their own bodies continue passing more and more restrictive laws against abortion. Thus, the clash of liberal and conservative habits continues on, sometimes violently, and so public education remains the best way to keep building a more democratic world. A few decades ago, a conservative southern governor said it like this: Racial segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever. Such conservative undemocratic feelings and ideas are often promoted in our own conservative schools; again, for us liberals they are merely habits, not eternal truth. When all people are seen merely as people, such feelings begin weakening.
Obviously, Dewey had faith in democracy and education as the most intelligent means for ending any feudalistic monopoly; violence wastes both life and money. For example, before the US entered World War 1, New Yorkers got a chance to vote such schools into their city system, where students were allowed to learn more practical kinds of work habits, like carpentry and electrical skills. Such schools would make it easier for students to find work after they graduated, and also make their book-work more meaningful and creative. So, the issue was put to a vote. During the campaign such progressive ideas were encouraged by William Wirt, the progressive Superintendent of the Gary, Indiana school system; he claimed such schools had actually saved taxpayers money, so many people listened.
Eventually, however, it was voted down; many immigrants simply felt their children just wouldn’t learn enough factual knowledge to get into universities and become doctors and lawyers. Today, however, social results like high drop-out rates, law-breaking, unemployment, and the high cost of prison maintenance are once again building the argument for more progressive kinds of schools, where character habits, as well as useful knowledge and skills, are learned with active kinds of constructive projects. In short, today's conservative book-centered schools continue failing to pass many practical tests of social excellence, like meeting student needs for learning more practical job skills.
That New York vote was just one election, and in many districts around the country people wanted more progressive schools built. Many other cities around the nation, like the steel town at Gary, gladly used Dewey’s practical education model for years. How can young folks be expected to get good jobs after high school when they haven't been taught how to work intelligently in their public schools? In fact, in a 1975 report by historian Ronald Cohen about the Gary schools he mentions an interesting fact. "By 1929 over 200 cities in 41 states had adopted (Dewey's educational ideas) in part or in whole, and few other communities remained totally unaffected by its innovations." That was probably the height of the progressive education movement. The Great Depression almost completely crippled many progressive school reform movements; while 25% of workers became unemployed, and lost their homes and savings, many wealthy folks continued getting wealthier.
At Gary many Africans at first weren’t convinced such schools were best. Because there wasn't enough adult education about such schools, the community there was divided over the idea. Even Dewey's old conservative nemesis, John Rockefeller's foundation, criticized Gary's Schools in a 1918 report, and so that experiment continued being looked at all through the 1920s to see its all-important results. On the whole, however, the progressive school movement was a very positive experience for many students who no doubt would have been much less prepared for life after graduation. With good work and business skills it became easier to get and hold jobs in the steel industry, helping reduce the need for government assistance and violent revolution; no doubt the Russian revolution had made many US conservatives jittery, including J. P. Morgan.
However, despite all its accomplishments at the time, progressive education just wasn’t able to solve one major social problem, racial hatred and segregation. Progressive schools in the South were few and far between, and it certainly wasn't just a southern weakness; it remained an ongoing national problem during all of Superintendent Wirt's term of office (1907-1938). During World War 2 the government helped out and began integrating the armed forces, and in 1954 a much more liberal Supreme Court stepped in to help. Its Brown v. Board of Education ruling finally said 'separate but equal' Jim Crow schools for whites and Africans was inherently racially unequal and thus unconstitutional! It was a big boost to our liberal democratic ideals of equal rights and opportunities, and lessened the talk of revolution heard so much during the 1930's Great Depression.
More liberal drug policies too were difficult to improve; no doubt, many conservatives used them to keep their jails full and reduce economic opportunities. Also, many supposedly respectable bankers were getting richer laundering drug money as well as helping outlaw many harmless drugs. As the late liberal Gore Vidal reminded us, since Prohibition in the 1920s, illegal drugs had created powerful criminal gangs, helped terrorize peaceful and law-abiding people, turned many of our banks into money-laundering sites, and greased many political pockets! Such results are yet more reasons why conservative book-centered schools can be seen as teaching habits much less than democratic excellence. How many students have graduated from such schools feeling learning itself was anything but fun and enjoyable?
Have Any Questions?
The conservative learning model also helped weaken a question-asking habit-art, and thus weaken curiosity itself. When a teacher prepares a lesson, including the questions to be answered, then what need is there to ask more questions? In real life, however, one of the most important habit-arts is intelligent question-asking! It can easily launch a new learning adventure. For many conservatives, however, such habit-arts are often seen as a real threat and danger to their power! After all, the more students are encouraged to question what's going on in their classrooms, and in the real world, the more they might ask how could we build a better world? Certainly, in times of war or economic recessions, such questioning could even weaken the status quo.
Progressive teachers thus encourage student questions and creative student answers as well, especially about what they're interested in and what they want to improve, both in themselves and their neighborhoods! Such student interest is needed to make learning much more than just another dull and boring book assignment. And to make such habits easier to practice, progressive teachers also allow students to work in smaller groups than the normal 30-40 class size. Such groups can more easily promote student talking and thinking, and thus help improve their monastery-like schools. Indeed, how can student curiosity keep growing when, for the most part, they're simply given their assignments by the teacher – book, paper, and pencil -- and when, in effect, they're treated like infants, rather than as growing individuals with real thinking and analyzing powers?
So What Happened?
You may now be wondering why didn't such progressive democratic schools keep growing? A major reason has to do with conservative philosophy itself; above all else the status quo should be preserved! In short, conservatives feel preserving old ideas and habits should be preserved just because they are old ideas and habits! Such habits feel comfortable and so should continue on.
Then, perhaps the second most important reason in the last 60 years was Russia's 1957 Sputnik satellite launch. It literally shocked the entire world! Conservative Republicans thus needed a scape goat, or else liberals would start blaming the Republicans. Quickly they decided to blame it on Dewey's progressive education ideas! President Eisenhower himself mentioned Dewey by name, and said his educational model was to blame; it largely ignored math and science studies, and thus helped weakened our space program! With such tactics and millions now afraid of communists being everywhere, conservative educators and politicians saw yet another opportunity to end progressive education's popularity. It was to blame for Russia's beating us into space! Such ideas were useful for educating the public about communist dangers, so it fit nicely into their anti-Communist Cold War programs. And when Russia began building huge numbers of H-bombs and putting them on missiles, it helped more people believe our schools needed to become more conservative by teaching everyone more math and science facts. That was the general idea when I was in high school in the 1960s. Many people were so afraid of communists they even built backyard bomb shelters. No doubt, such feelings were useful to all those being paid with tax dollars to keep building more H-bombs!
Thus, progressive education in general became another scapegoat for our own weak space program; it also justified feeding the military-industrial complex with tax supported billions. Instead of using rockets to launch useful satellites, the political system was forced to keep building more atomic warheads on rockets. With the Cold War arms race huge amounts of taxpayer money was spent building up our own nuclear arsenal, while not enough people bothered to demand politicians step forward and begin building cooperative systems, like we have with China and Vietnam today! Besides, merely one H-bomb can destroy an entire city, and both governments were building thousands of them?!
So, scapegoating progressive education in general, and even Dewey himself in particular, became fashionable in the 1950s and ‘60s. Not enough liberals stepped up and said such thinking was about as accurate as saying the moon was made of cheese. After all, already frightened people often believed anything merely because some political leader said it; for them merely simple statements create truthful feelings. And of course many liberals had become part of the system, and were afraid to put their own careers at risk; those who criticized conservative ideas often lost their jobs, even in liberal-oriented Hollywood.
In fact, however, such liberal scapegoating was ridiculous. Dewey based his entire educational philosophy on teaching students to intelligently use scientific facts to keep improving not only their own habits, but their schools and neighborhoods! He simply wanted all schools teaching students how to build and live in a less military-dominated world, where hundreds of millions of people would be endangered. To him experimental testing and its useful facts were crucially important for that goal, but Sputnik gave conservative politicians and educators a convenient scapegoat to avoid criticism of their own government and military spending; once again, liberals were blamed for the nation's space troubles. To this day, some 60 years later, many conservative politicians keep playing the blame-game while passing bills aimed at making our nation even more feudalistic than ever. Recently a number of people leaked information showing how much our government has been spying on almost everyone, and recording who they call and when. Even some liberals say it’s all in the name of national security, even though it hasn’t stopped terrorist attacks completely.
Finally, yet another reason for progressive education’s shrinkage was runaway experimentation within the movement. The movement began losing its main educational mission as it spawned a great variety of different experiments, like, for example, Summerhill-type schools. In them students were free to study whatever they wanted, and even not study at all. For Dewey that was the prescription for educational anarchy, not building intelligent habits; such schools took student freedom too far. For him it was best to teach students the art of experimental intelligence, rather than experimental anarchy. Sooner or later, students need to know how to intelligently make a living and work a job, so why not teach them such skills in our public schools, instead of merely allowing them to do whatever they wanted, or merely reading more books? In Section 35 we'll take a look at another recent educational experiment, so-called Charter schools, and in the next section see some more social reasons for building progressive liberal schools.
5. LIBERAL EDUCATION’S SCIENTIFIC ROOTS
Modern Science Created New Educational Needs
In this section we continue looking at more of the most important social factors helping create the need for more liberal progressive schools. In the last section we saw how religious Reformation, the Renaissance, and exploration continued weakening feudal otherworldly habits and fears of the natural world. In this section we’ll look briefly at an important 4th social movement, no doubt even more powerful than those other 3: the scientific revolution. For us Deweyan liberals its new intelligently active experimental learning method cannot be overemphasized in education, even at the primary level, and of course in daily life as well. In fact, the tremendous growth of knowledge caused by it in the last 4 centuries is now calling for radically different answers to education's 2 most important questions: what facts, skills, and character habits should students be taught, and how should they be taught them?
Because of the scientific revolution, it's simply no longer possible for anyone to know all the facts there are, and so the conservative book-centered model of teaching only facts and skills can now be seriously questioned and challenged by liberals today. In short, the conservative learning model is no longer educationally excellent in a democratic society. And what’s more, who should pick the facts students are made to learn? Should it be university educators, high school educators, or students and parents themselves?
As we’ve seen already, we democratic Deweyan liberals say what's needed these days is 3 new additions to our schools:
1. Allow students a greater freedom to more the facts, skills, and character habits they want to learn about;
2. Learn how to intelligently learn them with experimental testing;
3. And also how to use their ideas to help keep people and their neighborhoods safe and also improving.
Thus, science’s experimental learning habit-art should now replace the old conservative learning method of merely reading more and more facts assigned by the teacher. Among other weak results, that conservative learning model keeps creative and curious habit-arts, instincts, and impulses weak and unhealthful. For us it makes life in an always changing world more difficult and stressful. The more students feel what intelligent experimental learning is, and how they can use it to learn whatever they want to learn, the more intelligent people become. With that new learning method at the core of liberal schools, both research and character habits become much easier to teach and learn as well.
As Dewey observed, in the blink of an eye span of about a hundred years, from 1800 to 1900, educational excellence went from merely memorizing more and more textbook facts to knowing HOW to intelligently use our reliable and dependable scientific facts, for both personal and social improvement! In other words, feeling more personal and social weaknesses, WHERE to find information about stronger ones, building an intelligent plan to learn them, and then actively testing it, has become a much more intelligent definition of learning excellence than merely memorizing what Shakespeare, Newton, or even Einstein said. And if that’s true, then taxpayers themselves are now being challenged as never before to start building such schools in their own neighborhoods, rather than merely another conservative public or Charter school. That’s the new democratic challenge for people. Until enough people focus their progressive energies on building such schools, then we'll continue seeing many of the social problems plaguing us today, like excessive greed, unhealthful eating habits, increasing environmental dangers, and a political system often offering its services to the highest bidder.
For us liberals, in many ways our conservative, anti-experimental schools continue being our own worst social enemies. After all, what’s the good of having a head full of academic language, historical, or even scientific facts and yet not know how to use them intelligently on the job or at home? What’s the good of knowing such facts and still not being able to walk safely home after school, or even getting shot at while playing safely in one’s own yard? And so again, the art of intelligently using facts experimentally to solve real world challenges has become the new liberal educational model of excellence! In some neighborhoods, for example, it’s much more intelligent to know how to stop drug dealers from spreading their poisons, rather than learning more history and math facts!
Such knowledge about how to practice experimental intelligence will stay weak and unhealthful until taxpayers demand their politicians make their schools more liberal and progressive. The freedom to actively practice experimental intelligence is at the core of such schools. The aim is to liberal children from conservative schools in which students are made to follow orders and learn what they’re told to learn. Great fortunes have been made already with the help of such obedient and passive people. With such experimental freedom, students will become better at even judging our laws by looking at their actual results, and even working to change those undemocratic ones. It also might become more difficult to pass, say, unenlightened drug laws. After all, like alcoholism, greed, or obsessive gambling, drug use too is a sickness, rather than a crime. It even might become easier to actually start building more public banks around the country, so they can become better at working for the public good, rather than addictively increasing the wealth of a few.
In fact, conservatives have known about experimentation’s powers for centuries, and have used it to keep conservative schools working. In them important character habits are formally ignored, like learning how to enjoyably build and practice useful skills. Thus, they’ve helped keep society divided along class lines. So, until addicts can get drugs legally while learning how to enjoy life without them, then violent drug gangs will continue menacing innocent people in our cities and states, as well as corrupting greedy bankers, politicians, and police. Such results are now being seen by liberals as more reasons to keep challenging our conservative schools, even at the primary grade level! The sooner young students begin feeling how enjoyable intelligent experimental learning can be, the less need there'll be for using drugs to make life pleasurable and rewarding.
To say the very least, educational excellence has, with science's experimental learning art and Dewey's help, undergone a major reconstruction. Based on that learning method, we say in many ways it’s educationally unhealthful to keep making all students memorize facts they will almost certainly never use outside of school. What drug dealer will stop dealing when they’re told about how 2 mixed numbers can be added together? And another thing, such schools help keep important individual habits of curiosity weak, thus reducing the instinct to keep learning all through life.
Some More Educational History
Such liberal ideas can be stated even more forcefully. Not teaching the next generation intelligent experimental habits of learning has helped keep people on primitive and feudalistic levels of existence for millions of years! During the last 2 million years our primitive ancestors had almost no tools to keep learning how to make life less dangerous and safer. As a result, they began experimenting with spirit-ideas to overcome life's fearful feelings, like of death and disease. Even after the agricultural revolution started about 10,000 years ago, when people began settling down into villages and towns, there was little organized experimental testing and research. Thus both technology and democracy grew at a snail’s pace. Accepting a feudalistic social system run from the top down was the best habit to learn, thus making it easier to eventually accept conservative and moderate Platonic and Aristotelian models of nature in ancient Greece. For both of them there existed eternal and unchanging Truth, educated people should learn about it, and thus keep control over others less educated. If atheists and agnostics wouldn’t change their ideas, then Plato said they should be killed. Until only recently, as intelligent experimental testing became our strongest learning art, have such conservative actions become weaker. Today many conservatives feel the same way about gay and lesbian habits. In short, only recently, with experimental learning, has the conservative model of nature itself been replaced, including many religious ideas of absolute Truth. As a result, knowing such facts have become less important. For much of history educational excellence depended more on a sturdy genetic makeup, a powerful family, or a brutal disposition.
For most of civilized life our ancestors lacked the tremendously powerful learning tool of intelligent experimentation. Young folks learned the skills of their family, including kings and queens. As a result, most everyone learned the local conservative religious and magical rituals thought to make life less dangerous, more satisfying, and more healthful; many Bible pages discuss diet habits. Thus, without intelligent experimentation almost everyone was taught to passively accept a much lower standard of living and a closed feudalistic social, economic, religious, and political status quo. Needless to say, democratic choice was also kept to an absolute minimum!
However, with the growth of intelligent experimentation, it became much easier for people to reject passively following someone else’s orders, even teachers themselves. Any idea could be questioned if it produced dangerous and harmful results. Thus, more people began experimenting for themselves, on their own, to solve both personal and social challenges. Unfortunately, however, in many of our conservative schools today, such an active and intelligent learning art is still not taught on a formal level. The great power of creatively intelligent experimental learning still hasn't been institutionalized on a very wide scale. How many students took chemistry and physics classes in high school and never once heard a teacher say what exactly is meant by intelligent experimental learning, why it's our strongest learning art, and how it can be used in our daily lives?
As a result, we are still seeing large numbers of high school dropouts beginning their adult years with absolutely no idea about how best to teach themselves what they want to learn. High student unemployment rates are the natural result, as is more crime and lawlessness. And worst of all, we still see the clash between democratic progressives who believe in equal rights for all law-abiding citizens, and wealthy conservatives who believe they must keep using their money to keep increasing their feudalistic money power. Many even convince themselves they’re somehow more deserving and worthy of wealth than most everyone else! How many times have you seen conservative TV ads paid for by wealthy corporations preaching no government regulations? They know people will accept such ideas if they’re told them enough times, just like their teachers told them what books to read and what to believe.
In short, the educational challenge for us liberal Deweyans today remains as important as it was in the early 1900s, perhaps even more so. Conservative corporations have continued increasing their social, political, economic, and educational power to obscene and stifling levels, especially in the last 40 years, all done with more intelligent experimentation. As a result, most people have absolutely no feeling for experimentally testing ideas for their reliability; in some places teaching that very important habit-art to the next generation has become as challenging as teaching evolution itself! It's still a relatively new idea of Dewey's to make intelligent experimentation the basis for a liberal educational model. With it he wanted to take conservative education to a new, more democratic level, allowing students the freedom to choose their subjects and learn them experimentally, to keep improving both their own habits and neighborhoods. So, obviously, only as more people begin demanding classes in Constructive and Intelligent Experimental Learning, and actively used that art constructively, will they begin reaching a new educational level. There simply is no better way to ensure democracy's future than making intelligent experimentation the core of a liberal learning model. If not, conservatives will continue making our world fit for only conservative values and ideas, as perverse as some of them are.
Character Excellence
With intelligent experimental learning, the very useful art of personal improvement becomes just as important as learning reliable facts and skills. Only active practice with such habit-arts best helps their growth. Any weak, excessive, and unhealthful habit-art can be improved with experimental testing, even drug addiction and greed! With, say, active kinds of experimental role-playing, important character habits like truth-telling and helpfulness best start growing even in primary age students. With such active experimental role playing young folks best begin feeling what it's like to start intelligently guiding their own character excellence! With more student freedom, more students can start actively experimenting with such character habits after hearing more about what habits a healthy adult builds. Thus it’ll become easier to compare their own habits with more excellent ones, and also how to actively begin learning them experimentally. And when they also begin feeling HOW enjoyable intelligent experimentation can be, then the child become emotionally involved with the learning process, rather than being forced to learn what it doesn't want to learn. Where is it written school must be enslaving, boring, and dull? Many, if not most, students have those feelings year after year.
To be sure, Dewey wasn't a Marxist; he didn't believe such liberal experimental schools would be inevitable, or they could only grow after a violent revolution. No. Once again, the most intelligent way for them to evolve is with people intelligently experimenting in their own neighborhood schools! Such liberal schools can certainly happen if enough parents, teachers, and students demand an end to the conservative book-centered model of educational excellence, and begin replacing it one year at a time with a more liberal democratic experimental model, based on students actively practicing and using the ideas they learn. In that kind of liberal model, politicians will no longer be able to act with feudalistic educational power, as is still the case in Chicago and New York, but rather share equally educational decision-making between businesspeople, teachers, taxpayers and students! Only when focused and concentrated people power demand such schools will they best start becoming more of a reality with experimental learning.
6. THE BASIC CONSERVATIVE EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE
Many of our current conservative challenges can be traced back to what’s become known as The Powell Memo, or Manifesto. It was written in early summer of 1971, while widespread protests were going on across the nation on many college campuses in reaction to the obscenely brutal, deadly, and prolonged Vietnam War. While many minority young folks and Vietnamese were being needlessly killed and maimed for life, and many corporations were gladly making billions in taxpayer money to keep the killing going, DC lawyer Lewis Powell felt the entire capitalist system was being attacked by those who wanted to completely destroy it. There seemed to be only that so-called black/white situation, where protestors and critics had no real justification, and were completely divorced from that atrocious foreign policy. To us liberals, Vietnam was one of the worst foreign policy events in American history, if not the worst, and yet Powell, a future Supreme Court Justice, writes as if liberals had no real justification for condemning a system where large corporations were making huge taxpayer profits from the death of over 50,000 Americans and many times that many Vietnamese killed and maimed!
As liberals look at the memo today, available at reclaimdemocracy.org, it’s a rather cautious and moderate statement, especially when compared to more radical conservative sentiments today. Many want the government to give the business sector all the power it wants to do whatever it wants whenever it wants, and also make taxpayers pay for all their reckless and risky actions! For many conservatives, whatever the business sector does is really no one’s business, and it should stay that way. Powell wasn’t quite as radical, but his memo fired another opening shot at anyone he felt had no real justification for criticizing the economic system at all! To him what he called the enterprise system was under irrational attack and it must respond or it would be completely wiped out. If so, then it’s the statement of one more or less divorced from reality!
Powell wants conservatives to work more vigorously to overcome liberal criticism on a number of different fronts, like TV, newspapers, movies, government, and especially on college and even high school campuses. He writes: “… there is reason to believe … the campus is the single most dynamic source (of criticism and) … unsympathetic to the enterprise system. … Social science faculties … tend to be liberally oriented, even when leftists are not present.” He quotes another conservative writer: “Yale, like every other major college, is graduating scores of bright young men … who despise the American political and economic system.” (additions are my own) It’s as if no one has a right to protest being sent to die in a country posing absolutely no threat to the US! In short, obey the government, whether it’s right or wrong! Upon such feelings feudalistic social systems existed for many thousands of years.
So, what did he recommend? Well, he says the Chamber of Commerce should have “a staff of highly qualified scholars … who do believe in the system. … (they) should evaluate social science textbooks, especially in economics, political science, and sociology. This should be a continuing program. … should insist on equal speaking time on the college circuit. … urge the need for faculty balance upon university administrators and boards of trustees. … (become friendlier with) graduate schools of business … (and) request specific courses in such schools dealing with the entire scope of the problem addressed by this memorandum.”
Considering how much more radical the business sector has acted since 1971, it’s clear Powell’s memo was rather moderate and restrained. Today, our huge corporations have continued attacking organized labor, shipped jobs and profits overseas, often paying no taxes, continue accumulating hundreds of billions of dollars in their vaults, and in some cases get even more taxpayer rebate money. But it does show how some conservatives were thinking and focusing mainly on making more money, rather than increasing the public good. For many conservatives today, just about any government program giving people more control of their lives, and increasing the public good, is socialistic and therefore bad, if not evil.
More Recent Educational Challenges
More can be said about current conservative educational challenges. For example, the last Republican president, George W. Bush, signed an education bill called No Child Left Behind (NCLB) into law. However, if nothing else, the fine-sounding law (aren't they all fine-sounding?) can be honestly described by liberals everywhere as merely another example of conservative educational hypocrisy on a federal level! In it one set of abstract book-facts is used to control and dominate nearly all student-learning across the nation, whether they need to know such facts or not. To us liberals that model runs, if nothing else, completely against a democratic value of free choice, self-determination, and equal rights! Just like slaves in the antebellum South, by law neither students nor teachers have any choice about the subject matter to be learned. If they want to keep working and earn a diploma, then students must keep learning the abstract ideas others think they should learn. It's either that or drop-out. Case closed! And of course teachers must keep teaching such facts, or else risk losing their job.
To us liberal Deweyans, that educational model is simply anti-democratic! To us it's really another form of educational slavery for both teachers and students, practiced already for thousands of years! Teachers are now required by law to teach a certain number of facts, and only those facts. No doubt, if students choose to learn such facts, then they should be free to do so, but to make most all students learn them isn't educational democracy, it's educational enslavement. The opening quotes show even ancient conservative Plato was very against that learning model.
What’s more, it can be seen as yet another piece of conservative hypocrisy and irony worthy of Socrates himself. For centuries now conservatives have keep talking about reducing and eliminating government regulation and control throughout society, especially in the business sector. The smaller the government is, the better they like it. With NCLB, however, such talk about government control isn’t mentioned! Today, conservatives like Mr. Bush as well as his education-minded younger brother Jeb, see absolutely nothing wrong in regulating the entire education sector with federal law! If that isn't the height of philosophic hypocrisy, then what would be? Clearly, they too see the obvious power in education: the more the next generation is taught to obey their social superiors, and study only what they’re told to study, the easier it becomes for our huge corporations and military to keep their power intact, and thus maintain the feudalistic economic and military status quo! We Deweyan liberals don’t mean to destroy the capitalistic system, but merely to make it more democratic and thus more people-friendly.
On top of all that, we liberals say the federal NCLB law defines educational excellence in a very narrow and shallow way; it rewards students and teachers who passively are made to accept such a feudalistic, abstract, and academic learning model. That's some of its bad news. The good news is there are, already, some healthy signs of reaction against it. For example, recently Chicago teachers have experimented with a strike protest against just such an artificial definition of education, and especially basing teacher evaluations mainly on standardized test results. No doubt, in the future we'll see many more such protests.
Obviously, one lesson should be clear to all liberals. In many fundamental ways today conservatives take their education model very seriously, just as they take their no-government-regulation economic model very seriously, even when they openly contradict each other! Thus, if we liberals are to intelligently keep meeting such anti-democratic challenges, then we too must start experimenting with some more constructive and intelligent educational models. Only they can our schools begin teaching the next generation what the democratic value of freedom and equal rights feels like; only such schools and homes can best build more democratic, experimental, constructive, and excellent character habits.
Another important point can be made. Defining education so narrowly and uniformly as NCLB does, in effect openly discriminates against many inner city and poor minority students. How? Well, many poor students often have not been encouraged to build the same language and book-loving skills as many wealthy white students; their parents can easily afford expensive pre-schools. Hence, from the beginning, many lower class students start school without the same desire and ability to merely keep reading more and more books, and learning more abstract facts. As a result, schools becomes and remains boring, and we continue seeing very high drop-out rates in many of those social groups and schools, and even at the college level, where learning more such facts is demanded. Sadly, as statistics tell us, over 50% of college students never graduate!
As a result of such book-poor homes, all too soon many young folks come to feel they're not really smart enough to get a good education. Such feelings are tremendously important for lessening one's options in life. And the more that happens, the less they learn how to intelligently contribute to their own good as well as the publics.
What's more, how many people in the real world want to pay young folks to tell them about US History, geometry, English literature, and any other abstract facts? So again, in conservative schools their economic options become very limited. To us Deweyans, it's yet another result of maintaining a conservative educational model.
Again, the good news is this: it doesn't have to be that way! When they’re organized, people have the power to start improving such conservative schools and making them more actively experimental, rather than merely intellectual. All such conservative book-oriented schools can be greatly improved when parents, teachers, and students use intelligent experimentation. A noted Hindu religious leader, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, once said, I want everyone to be free. Many may feel that's an admirable feeling; who wouldn’t like to be free to do what they want? But we Deweyan liberals say freedom is always a growing affair; there never is a final state of freedom; life is always a process of becoming more or less free. In short, in an ever changing world no one can ever achieve a final state of perfect freedom. And so we liberals offer another 'final' educational goal: we want everyone to learn how to act intelligently, and that is always a function of intelligently using experimental learning and testing, for one's own good and the public good!
No doubt, many teachers are complying with the conservative NCLB law as best they can; they enjoy working with young folks and helping them learn about life. But the more experimental learning is ignored, the more schools are likely to become places where bazaar theatrical actions take place. For example, a recent Mother Jones article told about a principal telling students he's eat live worms if his students scored well on the yearly standardized tests! To us Deweyan liberals such actions are yet another example of the absurd results often produced in conservative schools, where learning itself is reduced to merely memorizing more and more book facts. Even more disturbing are the many reports of teachers openly cheating on tests by changing wrong student answers to right ones!
At the beginning of each school year many teachers usually give what’re called diagnostic tests to students, to see what they know, like a sheet of math problems. Well and good, but then NCLB says they must keep teaching students more abstract calculating skills they haven't learned yet, as if such work had some real use in the world outside the classroom. Students quickly learn that’s not the case. As a result, instead of teaching students how to experiment intelligently with what they're interested in, conservative school teachers often play a game called I'm-the-teacher-so-guess-the-right-answer-I-have! Psychologists call it operant conditioning. When students don't guess the right answer, then they don't get rewarded, and are sometimes even ridiculed.
Isn't it time more people began asking more intelligent questions about the conservative schools their taxes help pay for? After all, what is the sense of making all students learn about, say, RNA and DNA when they'll almost certainly never use such abstract ideas outside the classroom? No doubt, access to such knowledge should be available to all students; all classrooms should be wired with hi-speed broadband internet connections, so students can easily research answers to their questions. But why make all students slavishly learn facts they're not interested in? In the conservative NCLB educational model it’s as if both personal and social student needs should be ignored.
Who, then, can't see why many students, far too many students, begin feeling schoolwork is all but useless in their daily lives? Shouldn't such widespread feelings be a sign to start building more liberal schools, where they can more actively learn in school about healthy and excellent character habits, useful outside the classroom and all during their lives? As we'll see in sections 14-19, there are many different ways such knowledge can be used. As we saw in the last section, even those beginning to read can help illiterate adults learn more about the art.
As we’ve already seen, such conservative undemocratic schools are simply a holdover from medieval times, when religious leaders wanted to keep control of as many people as possible. Thus they taught the same religious ideas to all students. Such schools, however, continue ignoring how intelligent experimentation can help students start building some really useful habits, like good business skills. After all, when did people outside the monastery ever need to chant and pray for 8 hours a day, like monks and nuns did inside the monastery, and when do children today talk about RNA and DNA, or quadratic equations outside school? Even nurses and doctors rarely use such abstract ideas on the job; they too were kept subservient and passive in conservative schools. In fact, today many of our huge corporations and military want to have the same kinds of obedient and unquestioning young folks working for them; they even pass laws against those daring to reveal what they’re doing. Recently, even the few young folks who dared leak information about the spying actions of some of those organizations are quickly branded traitors and sometimes even jailed for years, just for telling the public what their taxes are being used for! Is that the kind of democracy we want, where taxpayers continue being milked for their money? One spying company is given over $5 billion of taxpayer money a year! Many conservatives even want to privatize Social Security, so they'll get to play more with retirement billions! I’m hoping now more people are becoming more aware of such on-going conservative challenges.
Thanks to the conservative NCLB education law, children are made to feel they need to know some arithmetic facts, and then some algebraic and geometric facts as well. Even more abstract math is often made available. And perhaps the worst result of all is this: after students get out of school and into the real world, they soon discover they almost never need to use any of the abstract facts they learned in school, like algebra and geometry. And the more that's true, the more people realize education is really nothing more than another racket; for the most past it’s felt to be just another waste of student time and taxpayer money! And because most people still don’t know what intelligent experimentation feels like, they feel trapped in a system they didn’t build and don’t want. Thus frustrating energies continue mounting. In fact, the widespread use of calculators in the business world has even reduced the need to memorize arithmetic facts; calculators are much better at reducing errors!
The common conservative justification for such abstract studies often rests on teaching children to think abstractly and reason logically. However, as we’ll see in a later section, that so-called faculty model of psychology has been discredited now for about 100 years, even though it went back to Plato and Aristotle themselves. For us liberal Deweyans there's now real objective evidence proving children learn to reason logically whatever they study intelligently, even if it's how to build a cabinet or better diet habits.
What then is the liberal alternative? In general, you might say what we Deweyan liberals are suggesting is making schools more like miniature cities, where people normally experiment with different skills and ideas on a daily basis, and meet together mainly to plan out the day’s work. How many people keep experimenting in the restaurant business all their lives? In such liberal schools, then, students will become freer to experimental with what seems most interesting to them, while teachers help them begin feeling what intelligent experimentation is like. As a result, many traditional discipline problems created by boredom will become less frequent; children will be more emotionally engaged with their work. No doubt personal problems will still exist, but again, learning to solve them with intelligent experimentation will become another useful skill learned; the art is often called conflict resolution. Or would we rather keep seeing young folks killing each other with guns? Even though today schools may be more colorfully decorated, and have more computers, students still need to know how to work intelligently, so they can use that learning skill all through their lives. The more they learn how to practice constructive intelligence in their schools, the easier it'll be to practice that art when they're on their own.
Perhaps the worst social result of conservative schools is this: Recent drop-out stats show us our schools are becoming irrelevant to a large and growing number of young folks, especially in our urban cities. What’s more, more and more of our public taxes are going to help wealthier schools better educate wealthier students. (see Rebecca Strauss, NY Times, 6-17-2013) As a result, only around 30% of students even go on to college, and a much smaller percent get a 4 year degree! If so, then isn’t that reason enough to start experimenting with more liberal kinds of educational models, especially at the primary, middle, and high school levels, and especially in our urban schools? Yes, such educational experimentation may be messy and noisy at first, and both teachers and students may become frustrated while learning what works best for students, but as religious leaders discovered thousands of years ago, the best way to build any new kind of school is with a small baby-step method, changing one grade at a time. We'll see more about that method in the sections entitled Why Not Reality Schools.
Here's another question taxpayers might want to start asking themselves about their conservative schools: Why should they keep paying for schools making students feel frustrated, bored, and also unprepared to contribute constructively after they graduate from high school? Some 70% of students don't go on to college! Why allow those students to feel they've been educationally ‘had,’ as it were, by their own neighborhood schools, feel they're not prepared for real world work, and perhaps even feel like they’re intellectually stupid simply because they don't want or need to know all the abstract ideas our conservative schools say they should know? Doesn't that sound like, say, punishing a dog or cat for not needing to be a vegetarian, or trying to intimidate heterosexuals, bisexuals, or homosexuals into believing their habits are somehow evil, deranged, and they should learn different ones? For us liberal Deweyans that is certainly not practicing a democratic feeling, where everyone, including prisoners, is an individual with different needs and wants. It seems as if our own slave-like feudalistic schools are, in fact, still disrespectful to one's natural democratic rights of choice and respect. If we don’t give children and parents that freedom, then how can we possibly expect them to give others that freedom when they’re adults? Without such freedom of choice it’s simply more difficult to keep building a healthy and vibrant political, economic, and educational democracy.
Am I being too harsh? Am I? The conservative NCLB law makes a conservative model the law of the land! So, in our cities and towns today such a feudal educational system exists, where the freedom to learn what’s most interesting is not an option. In Chicago, where I went to school, the mayor merely appointed the School Superintendent, thus taking peoples’ democratic educational power from those whose taxes paid for the schools! Also, how can we have a truly democratic school system of equal opportunity when it's based on property taxes, which are always lower in inner city neighborhoods and higher in wealthy suburbs? Even after the Civil War, such a financing system helped keep African schools much less excellent than white schools, and do to this day. That fact alone implies the federal government definitely has an educational financial role to play, especially when it comes to helping poor and low income families get better educated. Conservative Ronald Reagan’s Education Secretary William Bennett wanted to eliminate the entire Department of Education completely! Folks, the conservative educational challenge is real and on-going!
In the early 1900s Dewey helped people see they can confidently criticize such conservative roles for both teachers and students even at the primary school level, and also suggest better ways of producing more healthful social results. Why? Simply because we mean to keep building a more democratic world where concentrated feudal power is less dangerous and stressful for most everyone! As many people are realizing today, unrestricted capitalism leads inevitable to dangerous and stifling monopolistic power! We liberals simply mean to change the basic feudal institutions we’ve inherited from the ancient Greek and Roman worlds of Plato, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, and Augustine of Hippo. In today’s growing democratic world, where petty dictators, greedy wealthy folks, and conservative politicians are less tolerated, such schools simply help produce better social results, especially teaching the next generation how to intelligently build a more peaceful and enjoyable world for everyone with experimental learning! In today’s much more educated world, where millions have more democratic feelings about equal rights and opportunities, more people than ever before are seeing even religious models of truth reflect human habits and practices more than anything else. Thus, there's even less justification for demanding everyone must learn the same kinds of facts. No matter what field someone chooses to play on, it’s up to the people to intelligently challenge those who continue believing money should be used to create a feudalistic status quo, and make politicians continue passing laws perpetuating it. If a more intelligent experimental learning habit-art isn't taught to the next generation, starting in primary school, then in effect the conservative educational challenge will continue, and helping condemn some children to living not much better than animals, and using blind trial-and-error actions and make a quick buck whichever way they can!
As we saw in the last section, it’s certainly not difficult to start using an experimentally intelligent habit-art to make life better; as parents soon find out, children are like mental sponges, and easily learn new habits, skills, and ideas. They can easily learn what it feels like to actually enjoy improving both their own habits and their social world. Again, they can learn to enjoy respecting just laws, and intelligently helping others to help themselves, if they get the proper training. Don’t we want a nation of intelligent and caring business and professional people, who care about improving the world around them as well as their own weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits, rather than merely padding their own wallets throughout life? If so, then what better way to keep answering that greedy challenge than by actually practicing such skills experimentally?
No doubt, at first such classrooms might be noisier and more chaotic than quiet conservative book-centered classrooms would be, but there are many activities children can start exploring even in first grade. So, why not allow those students to start feeling they not only have the freedom to learn what they want, but also to learn with experimentally intelligent actions, and also learning to make the process enjoyable as well? It’ll then be that much easier later on to keep choosing intelligent actions, rather than greedy and harmful ones; the instinct will already be there. By their teenage years they’ll already have some solid instinctive feelings for intelligent experimentation, and how much more useful it is in the social world. They’ll already know such intelligent actions can often mean less frustration and danger in life, as well as paying lower taxes in adulthood for building more and more prisons for those who never learned to practice such intelligent actions. Instinctively, in such schools, they’ll already know it's much more useful to have the law on one's side. After all, conservatives who’re continually looking for more ways to make more money know it’s best to convince politicians to first pass laws in their favor. In the past 40 years the number of lobbyists in DC has gone from less than 200 to over 30,000! To us liberals it’s yet another sign of how addictive money-making can become, and how the strong the conservative challenge has become. We liberals say the sooner more students begin feeling more intelligent liberal values, the sooner our nation will become better at intelligently regulating our laws to better help everyone, rather than just the upper class.
In other words, our conservative public school system is rapidly becoming obsolete to most young Americans, and probably most young people around the world, where practical skills and knowledge are the most useful skills to learn. No doubt, to many conservatives such ideas paint a very negative picture of our public schools; most of the ideas talked about here, they may say, are simply too outrageous to even consider, like the use of the word feudalistic to describe many of our institutions today. Well, such ideas don't bother me in the least. Considering the state of educational debate in this country today, I'm proud to offer an educational model that's bold, confrontational, and also badly needed throughout the country. I'll leave it to readers to decide how good this model is, and how accurate its criticisms are.
In any case, however, I want to thank all the great folks at weebly.com for all their kind and generous help in getting this important book into cyberspace so people around the world can start reading it and hopefully learning how to build better and more liberal public schools. They remain a crucially important part of any kind of democratic growth and health, and for making our world a safer and more enjoyable place to live.
Jerome King
P.S. Please go to the Contributions Page next, and help our world become a more satisfying and rewarding place to live.
Page 1.1: Contents to Section 6
Contents
Opening Quotes
1. The Need for Liberal Schools
2. Education Highlights: Ancient
3. Education Highlights: Medieval
4. Education Highlights: Modern
5. Liberal Education’s Scientific Roots
6. The Basic Conservative Educational Challenge
Page 1.2
7. Liberal Education’s 4 Basic Values
8. More About Dewey’s Learning Model
9. Liberal Education's New Learning Art
10. Overcoming Challenges, Solving Problems
11. Passive and Active Education
12. Intelligent Work and Social Results
Page 1.3
13. Character Excellence: 101
14. Character Excellence: 102
15. Character Excellence: 103
16. Character Excellence: 104
17. Character Excellence: 105
Page 1.4
18. Character Excellence: 106
19. Spare the Rod, Improve a Life
20. Enjoyable Learning
21. Hollywood Talk
22. Liberating Tools
Page 1.5
23. To Advertise or Not
24. Is Health Our Greatest Wealth?
25. What Are Ideas?
26. Education Psych: Faculties v. Experimentation
27. IQ, You Q, We All Q
Page 1.6
28. How Faulty is Faculty Psychology?
29. Curiosity and Creativity
30. Desiring to Learn
31. The Eight Year Study
32. Debating Educational Assumptions
Page 1.7
33. More Reasons, More Solutions
34. Charter Schools
35. Reality Schools: Dewey’s Basic Position
36. Reality Schools: Biological Health
37. Reality Schools: Psychological Health
Page 1.8
38. Reality Schools: Economic Health
39. Reality Schools: Democratic Health
40. Getting From Here to There?
Opening Quotes
John Dewey: It is impossible that (philosophy) should have any success ...without educational equivalents as
to what to do and what not to do. ...the cause of the indefinite improvement of humanity and the cause of
the little child are inseparably bound together. ...the measure and worth of any social institution ...is its effect in enlarging and improving experience... ...the learning in school should be continuous with that out of school. ...If there is especial need of educational reconstruction at the present time ...it is because of the thoroughgoing change in social life accompanying the advance of science, the industrial revolution, and the development of democracy. ...A progressive society count individual variation as precious since it finds in them the means of its own growth. ...Ideals express possibilities; but they are genuine ideals only in so far as they are
possibilities of what is now moving. ..The educational process has no end beyond itself...
A. J. Ayer: The moral problem is: what am I to do?
Antiphon the Sophist: Primary among human concerns is education, for in any enterprise when the beginning is right,
the outcome is likely to be right too. When good education is ploughed into young persons, its effect lives and
burgeons throughout their lives.
Heraclitus of Ephesus: CHARACTER is destiny. …education is another sun to bask in...
Epicharmus (Sicilian comic writer): …the best thing to have is health.
Socrates of Athens: My good friends ...are you not ashamed of caring for money and how to get as much of it as you
can, and for honor and reputation, and not caring ...for wisdom and truth and for your psyche (your character), and how to make it as good as possible?
Democritus: Teaching reforms a man, and in reforming him makes him mature. ...Fortunate is the man who is cheerful with moderate possessions, and unfortunate he who is unhappy with many.
Confucius: Provide education for all people without discrimination.
Plato: Education ...the one great thing. ... a free psyche ought not to pursue any study slavishly ... nothing that is learned under compulsion stays with the mind.
Aristotle: ... the legislator should direct his attention above all to ... education... ... youths are not to be instructed ... to their amusement, for learning is no amusement, but is accompanied with pain. ... What we learn to do we learn by doing. .... moral virtue comes about as a result of habit...
Dwight Eisenhower (Republican US President): Educators, parents, and students must be continuously stirred up by the defects in our educational system. They must be induced to abandon the educational path that, rather blindly, they have been following as a result of John Dewey's teachings.
Hyman Rickover, U S. Navel Admiral: For all children the educational process must be one of collecting factual knowledge ... Nothing can really make it fun.
Upton Sinclair: ... my college education, which had left out socialism, and money and love, and marriage, had
also left out diet and health.
Martin Luther King Jr. : I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be
judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Barry Goldwater (Republican Presidential Candidate): The specter of single-issue religious groups is growing over our land. ...I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?
Andrew Carnegie: What is money but dross to the true hero?
Friedrich Nietzsche: ...out of a concern for happiness man tied off the veins of scientific investigation--and does so still today. ...Higher men are distinguished from lower, by seeing and hearing immensely more, and in a thoughtful manner... ...To ‘give style’ to one’s character--that is a grand and rare art! He who surveys all that his nature
presents in its strength and in its weakness, and then fashions it into an ingenious plan, until everything appears artistic and rational, and even the weaknesses enchant the eye...exercises that admirable art.
H.G. Wells: The essential factor in the organization of the living state...is...education. ...by the standards of what it might be, America is an uneducated country. ...From the days of the first Christian propaganda, popular educating has been smoldering in Europe, just as it has smoldered in Asia, wherever Islam has set its foot,...enabling
(the believer) to read a little of the sacred books... Christian controversies...ploughed the ground for the harvest of popular education.
Anonymous: There is no limit to either intelligence or ignorance. ...A modern college is a place where 2,000 can be seated in the classrooms, and 50,000 in the stadium.
Mark Twain: I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
R. Mackenzie: My education was so sound that I hardly know anything.
Ambrose Bierce: Education: that which discloses to the wise, and disguises from the foolish, their lack of
understanding.
Ralph Emerson: We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
Epictetus: If you would make anything a habit, do it...
William James: The hell (of the hereafter)...is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by
habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.
Bertrand Russell: Passive acceptance of the teacher’s wisdom is easy for most boys and girls... Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes men to seek a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position.
Abby Hoffman: In American … society the university is traditionally considered to be a psychosocial
moratorium, an ivory tower where you withdraw from the problems of society and the world around you to work on important things like your career and your marriage.
George B. Shaw: We must not live for ourselves alone... I conclude that the secret of a genuine liberal education is to learn what you want to know for the sake of your own enlightenment, and not let anybody teach you anything
whatever for the purpose of pulling you through an examination. ...School was to me a sentence of penal
servitude.
John Dewey: When the school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little
community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious. ...education is a constant reorganizing and reconstructing of experience. ...the educational center of
gravity is in the cultural or humane aspects of the study... ...the establishing of character is a comprehensive aim in school instruction...
Robert Ingersoll: ...intelligence, guided by kindness, is the highest possible wisdom. ...Superiority is born of
honesty, of virtue, of charity, and above all, of the love of liberty. ...I believe the time will come when
there will be charity in every heart, love in every family, and law, liberty, and justice will surround this world.
...the man who acts best his part--who loves his friends the best--is most willing to help others...who has the best heart--the most feeling--and the deepest sympathies--and who freely gives to others the rights he claims for
himself is the best man. ...It is a great thing to preach philosophy--far greater to live it.
Jane Addams: We are impatient with the schools which lay all stress on reading and writing. (It) fails to give the child any clew to the life about him.
Herbert Spencer: What knowledge is of most worth?
Martin Luther King Jr.: We must remember intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character -- that is the goal of true education.
Christopher O. Weber: Education will become what we make it to become.
Jules Henry: ...learning (how) to learn has been, and continues to be, Homo Sapiens' most formidable evolutionary task. ...the cultural pattern (in education) has been a device for binding the intellect. In the 1300s Muslim
teachers used to chain boys up until they memorized the Koran... ...schools are the central conserving force of the culture. ...The function of education has never been (on a large scale) to free the mind and spirit of man, but to bind them (to the cultural-tribal patterns)... ...sameness was the road to approval and love, difference to the dangerous unknown... ...schools train children to fit the culture, rather than improve it... ...questioning--creativity itself--must be limited... ...a vital democracy can only be the product of a disciplined and intelligent population... ...disorder and
laxity are poison to democracy... ...learning to be narrow, stupid, and absurd, as well as alienate the
self from new and more useful experiments (have too often been the results of education)...
John Dewey: The only freedom...of enduring importance is freedom of intelligence... the formation of (constructive) purposes and the organization of means to execute them are the work of intelligence. ...Where schools are equipped with laboratories, shops, and gardens, where (enjoyable) dramatizations, plays, and games are freely used, opportunities exist for reproducing situations of life, and for acquiring and applying information and ideas ... of progressive experiences...
Benjamin Disraeli (British PM): The first consideration of a minister is the health of the people.
SECTION 1
THE NEED FOR LIBERAL SCHOOLS
Welcome to one of the most important subjects of all – the philosophy of education. We start with a brief glance at the on-going social battle between liberals and conservatives, especially in education. We Deweyan liberals see a major contradiction in the conservative position on education. They seem never to tire of saying government is the problem, not the solution. And yet they continue using governments around the world to enslave children to a book-centered model of education and testing! In such schools books and teachers become the center of attention, rather than student needs themselves. We liberals say that educational model is not only a contradiction of conservative small-government principles, but it's disrespectful to young folks themselves, who continue to be told their own educational needs and wants are irrelevant.
Around the world today democracy continues budding out from its conservative feudalistic branch, but its growth will remain small, weak, and confined unless it’s energized and nourished by liberal democratic schools, homes, and churches. For us Deweyan liberals, the child's needs and wants should, within reason, become the center of education, In short, education and democratic power are organically fused together in the real world, and each generation plays a part in their growth, or non-growth as the case may be.
Thus, an educational choice becomes available. What kind of a world do we want to keep building, a conservative feudalistic world where power stay concentrated in small undemocratic decision-making centers, and focused on mainly gaining more wealth and power for themselves, or do we want to keep building a world where such power is more equally shared, and where democratically increasing the public good is the main goal?
Over the past 40 years, from 1980 to 2010, liberal politics, economics, and education have been weakened by
concentrated conservative attacks in many small ways. Democratic liberalism was a growing social force from 1900 to 1950. There were strong growth spurts, so to speak, in the early 1900s, the 1930s, and the 1960s, but since then, conservative economic power has been used to turn liberal ideas and laws into a much weaker force for the public good, like fewer well-paying jobs, less union bargaining power, and even educational programs teaching little knowledge and skills useful for high schools graduates in the real world. Around the world unemployment rates for the 18-25 years old often are as high as 50%, and even higher in some places. Many conservatives like that situation; it makes filling army jobs that much easier.
How did such things happen? How have our governments, economies, and schools returned to conservative undemocratic models, and thus helped build huge personal fortunes for a few, around 30,000, and in effect
enslave most all students to learning knowledge they’ll rarely use as adults? This book will talk about such events, but more importantly, also describe what liberal kinds of schools and other institutions can look like.
What makes schools feudalistic and conservative, or any institution for that matter? That’s easy. All such institutions are simply run by a small, usually unelected, group of decision-makers, who then control what students, workers, and taxpayers should do. In short, any institution run from the top down, so to speak, is defined here as a conservative feudalistic one. It’s been the social status quo for thousands of years, and so it’s easy to define them that way.
Furthermore, in such schools more and more students have become disconnected mentally and physically from knowing what’s happening in the real world, and more importantly, from learning how to intelligently make our
institutions more liberal and democratic. Thus such schools are making it easier for conservatives to keep building their own wealth and power, and recently to even start taking taxpayer money in some so-called Charter schools. Other conservative educational programs are called No Child Left Behind, signed into law in 2,002 by conservative President George W. Bush, the Common Core Standards movement begun even before that, and even Democratic President Barack Obama’s Rise to the Top funding program. It certainly isn’t difficult to see why. Politicians must get campaign re-election funds from wealthy donors, and many of them are quite conservative people. So, we liberal Deweyans ask, shouldn't the public have an educational choice besides conservative public schools and conservative charter schools? To us the answer is obviously yes. Tax payers should have the freedom to build more liberal schools if they so choose.
For thousands of years now civilization has been the site of on-going battles between liberals and conservatives. For what? For many people shear social power is the ultimate drug. Conservatives have wanted to keep their power and control over people, so as to make their own lives easier and more comfortable. For thousands of years serf-farmers have been supplying food for their tables and soldiers for their wars. Liberals, on the other hand, have fought to free themselves from such a system, wanting social equality and equal opportunities; history is full of slave-revolt stories. Conservatives, on the other hand, have worked, and still work, and still work, to keep their social forms of power in the hands of a few while ignoring equal human rights and the public good. What’s more, down through history to this day, conservatives have also used religious ideas and habits to promote obedience; the phrase ‘god’s will’ echoes to this day. In fact, it’s been used to justify a feudalistic political, economic, and education program for thousands of years, as we’ll see a little later!
As a result, for most of history during the past 5,000 years, conservative ideas and habits have remained widespread, strong, and dominant; not because they were really eternally True and unchanging, but because people were educated to accept them, often with military force. Mainly they've remained dominant simply because they were what young folks were made to learn, generation after generation throughout the centuries. Also important was how such ideas and habits were taught. Again, history teaches us brutal violence was often a conservative educational tool, such as the Inquisition and religious wars. As cities grew religious ideas were used to justify conservative forms of political, economic, and educational power. For example, for an Egyptian commoner even to look at the god-pharaoh meant death; heads were to remain bowed and obedient.
Eventually, in ancient Greece, conservative and moderate philosophic ideas also became useful tools in such cultural battles, conservative Plato's and moderate Aristotle's in particular. For thousands of years all of Christian philosophy itself was dominated by their ideas. Even in our modern era, US history and education offers many examples of those basic battles for power, again with conservatives winning many of them due, in large part, to their economic power.
Until quite recently praying in public schools was commonplace. After the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution made money the main weapon in such battles. In the late 1800s, for example, money helped build a very conservative Supreme Court composed mostly of corporate lawyers; in 1896 they even ruled states could build 'separate but equal facilities' for whites and Africans, thus continuing to deny Africans their equal human rights and maintaining their control over them.
Because ancient, medieval, and modern conservatives largely controlled what students learned, often using pain to teach them, it's been fairly easy for them to keep increasing their feudalistic economic, political, and educational power. Throughout the 1900s, for example, many Africans were simply murdered while working for their equal rights. Childhood habits of obedience to the teacher and book-assignments in conservative schools made adult obedience to political, economic, and military leaders that much easier. In other words, neighborhood schools themselves have, to this day, remained yet another very useful conservative weapon in their battles with liberal democrats. Such schools helped encourage conservative feudalistic systems against independent thinking, popular democracy, and democratic equal rights. However, with such forms of feudalistic power life itself has remained much more difficult and stressful for millions of people.
Feudalistic systems? Is that phrase really too radical? Not with the definition of feudalistic mentioned above. It simply means and undemocratic organization! Who wants to question, for example, their work-supervisors when children need food and there’s a mortgage or rent to pay? And so many feudalistic forms of power still exist, even in the US and around the world! Such systems are still alive, well, and growing today in economics, for example, with huge monopolistic corporations in finance, energy, weapons-making, and transportation. No doubt, they help make constructing large projects like interstate highway systems easier to build, but at the same time they also make controlling them with laws aimed at the public good much more difficult. What politicians want to pass laws against those who finance their elections?
In US politics, too, such feudalistic systems take the form, say, of a small unelected Supreme Court, as well as our largely economically controlled legislatures. Wealthy donors often use their great wealth to create negative ads against those they don’t want elected. In education too, conservative laws like the kind-and-gentle-sounding No Child Left Behind law actually dictates what teachers must teach and students must learn to graduate, as well as judging teacher effectiveness with the help of standardized test results. If students get low test scores, then teachers are not doing their rightful jobs; conservatives want to hold teachers accountable for what many see as academic trivia, justified with the idea of producing well-rounded students. So, naturally democratic liberals like John Dewey asked why should students be forced to learn what they have little need or desire to learn? And of course our feudalistic undemocratic armed services still operate largely as they did in the Middle Ages. In them democracy is almost non-existent and one's basic human and political rights to, say, equal protection under the law is often neglected and ignored. As a result, even sexual abuse is rapidly becoming all too common even today.
Thus, we liberals see all such undemocratic conservative systems as medieval, feudalistic, and thus dangerous to a democracy aiming at improving the common good, especially building better schools. Never since the 1920s has there been such a huge economic class difference in the US! What’s more, how can more people easily become more aware of dangerous economic events, like housing and stock market scams, if economic knowledge is largely ignored in our schools, and it is? Many people may feel we're now living in a completely new and modern era, but in fact undemocratic, conservative, and medieval feudalistic organizations continue controlling much of civilized life itself, economically, politically, and educationally! That is the basic reality seen through liberal eyes. Huge profit-making for the already obscenely wealthy, with war after war after war, and paying for them with public taxes, is yet more evidence of how the lower classes remain enslaved to their wealthy upper classes and their political leaders, made all the easier with conservative schools working throughout the land, and their building of passive habits of obedience in young folks. Such greedy conservative politics have created such hatred for us around the world, our own government has begun collecting electronic information on all US citizens, despite our Constitution’s 4thAmendment guaranteeing all citizens the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures!
For us Deweyan liberals, a powerful antidote to such a situation is more liberal public schools. Here’re some more recent results of conservative actions. Over the past 40 years, for example, conservative anti-democratic power has been increasing in all those systems! Corporations have become more powerful through mergers and cutting their labor costs with cheap foreign workers. Politicians have thus become more controllable with more campaign funds, and schools have become more conservative with the No Child Left Behind law, passed in 2002. Recently several congressional bills have been introduced to change some of its more obnoxious results, but so far none have been signed into law. Also, one very stressful economic result for people has been freezing of salaries paid to more and more people, as well as job losses with shipping jobs overseas. In short, simply making ends meet and paying one's bills have become much more stressful for millions of Americans, not to mention many more losing their homes and becoming homeless from the latest housing scam!
As a result, democratic power keeps declining. In fact, recently such increased conservative control is causing even many educated skeptics and cynics to question democracy's power itself. Some in North America and Europe are now convinced even democratic politics has become almost completely controlled by the wealthiest, thus making even elections incapable of controlling our huge and powerful feudalistic corporations. They’re become freer to even avoid taxes altogether and send more and more of their profits to off-shore bank accounts, all with the government’s blessing!
Democracy, it seems, has lost its power to promote the public good, and more importantly, also create more liberal schools where the next generation learns basic educational habits of excellence. Fewer adults have been taught to build intelligent habits like experimental learning, critical and constructive thinking, non-obedience to the status quo, building more democratic power-sharing organizations, learning useful character habits of respect for others and our just laws, and even basic practical business skills so they can start earning a decent living after high school. What matters most is not how many degrees one has, but how quickly one can learn new skills and knowledge.
A recent article entitled The Democratic Disconnect said: "Democracy is in trouble. The collective engagement of a concerned citizenry for the public good ... is eroding. Democratic governments often seem crippled ... to deliver what their people want and need." (E. J. Dionne, The Washington Post, 5-20-13) So, it seems more important than ever for we liberals to ask: Have the conservatives finally won the battle to keep all their undemocratic and feudalistic forms of social power in place, including schools, corporations, the government, and the military? Should we liberals finally wave a white flag of surrender, once and for all, and meekly accept a feudalistic reality as too powerful to change?
This book’s answer is CERTAINLY NOT!! No human system is too powerful to make more democratic if enough people want it! As history also teaches us again and again, that’s the key weapon no conservative organization can withstand -- human democratic power! Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation is, perhaps, the best example of that power; to this day conservatives continue working to end it, all in the name of merely making more money, and thus strengthening their economic power. So, the important question for we liberals is what can ordinary people do to start taking better control of their neighborhoods, and our nation, and keep the battle alive and growing for democratic equal rights? What educational ideas can liberals use to start experimenting with in their own
neighborhood schools?
This book, Liberal Education, is largely based on John Dewey’s educational ideas. It offers both liberals and independents many ideas to test in their own neighborhood schools for ending dangerous and stressful feudalistic systems throughout society. For too long conservative schools have helped make life easy for the wealthy, and more difficult for everyone else! In fact, John Dewey (1859-1952) was one of America's greatest liberal thinkers, and his educational ideas were once practiced by hundreds of schools around the country in the 1920s and '30s! They also helped encourage labor unions to grow and demand more power in the corporate decision-making process, with the help of strikes and boycotts. Ever since, however, conservatives have been attacking labor unions and their power, as well as liberal schools! They knew how dangerous they were to their own feudalistic power. However, today, such liberal schools can be just as useful, practical, and supportive of democratic ideals as they ever were! In them intelligent, active, constructive, questioning democratic habits are taught with active kinds of intelligent experimentation. Such liberal habits pose a direct threat to all forms of conservative and concentrated feudalistic power, based on obedience and acceptance of the status quo! In liberal schools students are taught the habit-art of intelligent decision-making and also learning what their elected officials are doing here and now with the public’s money. In fact, after 1600 such intelligent experimental habits of learning are what finally broke the conservative religious monopoly on their models of Truth, and thus liberated people from obedience to them to start growing our strongest and most reliable kinds of truth – experimental truth.
In short, though conservative power may seem too strong today, there are in fact many good educational weapons liberals can start using in the battle to make our nation more democratic, intelligent, secure, stable, and caring for everyone, not just a wealthy upper class. Much of the US may still be dominated and controlled by a small wealthy and powerful conservative upper class, with about 1 million people, but our local neighborhood schools are just as important to us liberals today as they've even been! In fact, they're the best places for all liberals to help the next generation learn what intelligent liberal democratic ideas and habits feel like and how they can be practiced. As long as that happens, any democracy will remain alive and growing. We Deweyan liberals simply have no time or patience to accept negative and defeatist feelings!
Liberal neighborhood schools are always a very important tool for building a more stable and enjoyable democratic life for everyone. They are the basic building blocks of all healthy democracies. So, if they aren't built and supported, then conservative and concentrated feudalistic power already in place will continue dominating our social lives, separating people into extreme economic classes of rich and poor, and also dominating our political and educational systems. We can see some dangerous results of such concentrated feudalistic power in many of our own universities today. In many of them student fees and tuition costs are being raised by largely unelected boards of trustees (yet another nice-sounding phrase). Why should such people really be trusted? Job prospects continue shrinking and student debt is now over $1 Trillion dollars, much of which will go to wealthy bankers! So, we liberals say even that feudalistic system can be changed for the better. The more students and teachers demand an equal democratic voice in school board decisions, the less feudalistic and dangerous our universities will remain for both students and teachers! As it is now, wealthy conservatives often control which professors are rewarded and encouraged, and which aren’t.
In fact, liberal democratic freedoms themselves depend directly on people being free to start experimenting with better educational ideas, especially in their own neighborhood schools! Why? Simply because there are better facts and habits to teach, as well as better ways of learning them! After all, public taxes pay for our schools, so why shouldn't they too work for the public good? For us Deweyan liberals, education means much more than making students passively sit at their desks working teacher-given assignments of basically academic trivia. Why should they? This is perhaps the key statistic for us liberal Deweyans: About 70% of high school students don't go to college, so why are they being told to learn such academic knowledge and facts? There are many other useful habits and basic skills they can be learning, so they can start making some honest money after they graduate, instead of becoming unemployed or working for what many call slave wages!
Thus 2 questions become very important: what other ideas can our neighborhood schools be teaching, and how should they be teaching such subjects? Liberal answers based largely on John Dewey's work will help answer those 2 fundamentally important educational questions.
More Reasons for Liberal Schools
No doubt, to a small number of people academic facts and knowledge are useful, like paleontologists, doctors, scholars, researchers, writers, and engineers. However, as our high drop-out rates around the nation keep telling us, sometimes as high as 50%, to many students such facts are seen as academic trivia they neither want or need to know. Passing the conservative No Child Left Behind law in fact gave the conservative educational model a virtual monopoly for teaching such facts in our public schools! As we’ll see in Section 35, the results of that conservative education law have been producing less than excellent results not only for many teachers, but for some 70% of students who don’t go to college! Thus we liberals need to ask: Why make most all students learn mere academic facts when they're not needed or wanted? In fact, it’s a form of educational slavery from conservatives who keep boasting about being the defenders of freedom and liberty! Such slavery also creates more discipline problems for teachers.
For us liberals, the conservative agenda seems obvious: They want children to form habits of obedience and acceptance to what their supervisors tell them to do! With such habits conservative anti-democratic forms of government and religion have remained strong and dominant for the last 5,000 years! Workers are made to accept what they’re given, not what they rightly deserve – a fair and equal share of their profits. So we ask: Why shouldn't all students be free to learn democratic forms of education, like learning what they want to learn? And in that process also start learning how to actively and experimentally build intelligent habits useful throughout life? Perhaps now more than ever, such habits are needed in a nation still dominated by profits and money, and in which many feudalistic forms of life continue on? Why shouldn't students start learning how to intelligently build a healthful body-mind, so they can build similar businesses, learn to respect people and our just laws, and how to best keep teaching themselves new and useful character habits, like wit and humor? Students would learn such habits in more liberal schools.
Even in the early 1900s, liberal educators like John Dewey said schools ignoring those kinds of active democratic habits are, in fact, helping create many unhealthful personal and social results, for which all taxpayers pay the price. How bad is it getting? You tell me. Somewhere around 50% of students in cities like Los Angeles today are actively rejecting such a conservative educational model and simply dropping out before learning many important liberal habit-arts for living intelligently in a modern democratic society. Many conservatives don’t mind; they like to have such people working for them; they tend to accept whatever pay they’re offered and follow orders. Docile, undereducated, and obedient workers make it easier to keep profits growing! Socially, however, it's easier for juvenile and adult crime to grow, as well as police forces and prisons to keep growing, especially when people don’t know how to make an honest living. Such young adults are also more afraid to strike and demand more democratic decision-making power where they work. They also make selling more products easier and more profitable, everything from deodorant to cars to the next war, thus helping keep millions in debt and enslaved to their menial jobs.
We liberal Deweyans say the most intelligent and best way to start ending such stressful habits and feudalistic actions is with the building of more liberal schools! For example, it’s easy to imagine many solutions to our present social and economic problems, like building more public state banks, taxing huge corporations for all their financial trades, limit money-obsessed hedge funds, and pass more regulatory laws. But unless the next generation is educated to keep making our nation more democratic and peaceful, then conservatives can easily keep their power in place by working to have such laws revoked. With more democratic habits it’ll be much easier for people to start demanding the power to say what their tax money be spent for, rather than continue obediently giving it to politicians who are largely controlled by our huge economic corporations. In such a situation it becomes fairly easy to keep giving such corporations huge amounts of money to keep building more weapons and military bases overseas, even
though most all of them don’t help make our nation any more secure and safe!
No doubt, those wealthy folks working to preserve their own concentrated forms of feudalistic power, in our political, economic, and educational systems, are not bothered by such drop-out rates, but it hurts them too. More and more taxes are needed from them to pay for more government services, like prisons and healthcare. No doubt, many support politicians who will support their small-government ideas, and allow them to keep sending more of their profits to tax-exempt offshore banks! After all, conservatives since Plato have wanted habits of obedience to the social status quo; for him young people should be taught to act only when they’re told to; creative and democratic thinking and acting were in fact dangerous to social stability. And, he helped justify such conservative obedient habits by saying human nature itself is naturally divided into distinct classes with different learning abilities; most people are only capable of following orders! Aristotle too said some people are slaves by nature. Thus the lower classes should be made to obey those who really know the Truth. Thousands of years ago, however, the more democratic Confucius saw more clearly the educational reality: When people are truly educated, class distinctions disappear. In short, excellent liberal education aims to build the best defense against feudalistic power by building habits of equality and equal opportunity in the next generation!
Are our conservative book-oriented public schools really that bad for democracy? Well, the social results of unemployment, criminal behavior, drop-out statistics, and drug-use continue showing us how weak the social results are of such schools. When formal character excellence is ignored, such results are common. Obviously some useful habits are learned in conservative schools, like how important book-knowledge can be, but they can become much better with more liberal ideas and practices. By teaching mainly useless facts and knowledge, they certainly contribute to our many social problems. In fact, far too many of the next generation are now leaving school and entering their adult years with knowing hardly anything about intelligent experimental learning, and how that habit-art has become our strongest learning tool! With it, it becomes much easier to keep learning socially excellent and helpful character habits, law-abiding skills, and how to intelligently keep working for the public good, rather than merely for some greedy corporation’s wealth and profits.
In short, most students in conservative schools simply haven't been formally taught what it's like to actively feel
enjoyment while working intelligently, how to think and act creatively and experimentally, how to identify weak, excessive, and unhealthful personal and social actions, how to intelligently solve them one step at a time, why habits of obeying just laws and helping others help produce excellent results, and how to intelligently keep expanding their own limited and confining habits! In short, they haven't yet gone to a liberal democratic public school, where such habits are formally taught on a daily basis, like how to keep making our society more democratic and how to keep improving our own neighborhoods, rather than leaving them neglected and unproductive.
Today, educational battles between liberals and conservatives continue on just as they have for centuries! Conservatives know full well, teaching children such liberal democratic habits weaken their feudalistic social and economic power. A corporation of liberal workers would simply demand an equal share of decision-making power and equalize salaries, or else shut down the business! And the same could happen in our schools, our political systems, and our military as well! Military leaders used to lead their armies; now they often sit safely at their desks and command centers. Thus conservative CEOs, educators, and politicians simply don’t want to democratically share their decision-making power with anyone except a small group, like corporate boards of directors; for one thing, it might decrease many of their own obscene CEO incomes!
For such reasons, conservatives want nothing more than to keep educational laws like No Child Left Behind firmly in place! They want to continue forcing most every student to keep learning more soon-forgotten academic facts, or else drop out. Many conservatives simply do not want more students learning more about economic, political, or educational reality, like how many of our 1 million super-rich people today already own or control about 50% of our nation’s wealth, thus increasing life’s stresses for more than 300,000,000 people while decreasing opportunities for them! They also do not want young folks learning more about how to keep making our feudalistic systems more democratic, or how to elect more liberally progressive politicians to help with that goal. Again, such knowledge would only help weaken their own feudalistic corporate power to elect only those obedient to them! Often they justify such results saying the wealthy are the real job creators, so they need more money; it’s called the Trickle Down economic theory, popularized during the conservative Reagan administration. The last 40 years of economic stagnation, huge job losses, the growth of huge banks, and 3 major wars show us the results of that theory.
More About Conservative Social Systems
Feudalistic institutions, in this day and age? Definitely! In fact, they’re still the dominant form of social organization in the world today, and many thinkers have justified them on paper. Any feudalistic, undemocratic political, economic, and educational system can easily be designed on paper to produce excellent social results. Many have already been built, from Plato’s Republic to Adam Smith's laissez-faire capitalism to modern-day Socialism to Russian and Chinese state capitalism. For example, Smith's model of laissez-faire economics said capitalism is a self-regulating system; within it are built-in regulations to make everyone's life better; government should thus stay out of the economic realm. In practice, however, such an unregulated economy soon produced a flock of small monopolistic and powerful corporations free to set any prices they wanted, pay workers as little as they could, help elect obedient politicians, and thus continue taking as much money from people as they could; so much for Smith’s rosy self-regulating economic model.
And of course Jefferson's small government idea sounded great on paper. In practice, however, where it really counts, it allowed more obnoxious and stressful social results for most everyone. Politicians told people they shouldn't interfere with businesses; it might disrupt economic laws! Thus corporate monopolies continued growing. Then, from 1920 to 1932, after 12 years of practicing such conservative small government ideas, the result was the worst economic depression in US history, with thousands of bank failures, savings losses, and 25% unemployment! Wealthy conservative folks simply paid to elect obedient politicians to ignore regulations, create a huge stock market scam called a bubble, and make it more difficult to pass more intelligent gun, banking, and environmental laws, to name a few. Selling tons of freshly printed stocks and making guns can be very profitable industries, thus helping make them politically powerful and helping keep our basically feudal systems in place; money and profits continued
becoming the new modern god. For we liberal democrats, almost certainly life itself will not become safer and more satisfying within such systems unless more people are educated about how to intelligently start making it more democratic. The public good has simply been left out of the feudalistic equation. A few corporations may be run by enlightened CEOs, but most won’t be. How many parents today now live with more daily fear for their children’s lives because of recent deadly school shootings with horribly destructive weapons?
Are such statements really too outrageous, or not outrageous enough? Are you a conservative or a liberal? As we'll see a little later, weak and unhealthful personal and social results of our conservative public schools are the direct result of their teaching model, recently made into educational concrete with the No Child Left Behind law. It’s based on teaching more and more academic facts to most all students, all in the name of academic certitude and student well-roundedness, whatever that means. Now really, how ‘well-rounded’was Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and George Hegel? Does being well-rounded mean everyone should know for a few years what a mixed number is, and how to add, subtract, multiply and divide them; what Shakespeare wrote 400 years ago; what a marvelous job our constitutional Framers did; and how it’s really good not to question and learn what our own government is doing with our own tax monies? Such anti-democratic habits are taught today in the name of well-roundedness largely because they’re part of the conservative book-based educational model. Learning such facts helps keep students meek, unquestioning, and obedient to their teachers and their books, rather than learning how to think and act critically, creatively, and democratically, and how to use their collective power to actually make life better for people!
How many students learn our Framers certainly weren't democrats and had very weak feelings for equal rights? Even Thomas Jefferson did practically nothing to end slavery even though he wrote the fine-sounding Declaration of Independence? With conservative schools controlling what students learn, rather than actively teaching students to intelligently learn what they want to learn, and making them more aware of the nation they live in, it’s become easier for more public tax money to be used to build more and more prisons, missiles, bombs, and guns; the world’s oldest democracy is now the world’s greatest gun-maker! Is that what academic well-roundedness means? Today more and more people are even accepting the idea of constant warfare conservatives keep talking about as natural and normal.
Certainly empire-minded conservatives have been talking that way! It’s profitable, especially for those wealthy folks who keep making those guns and weapons! Are such results the effects of an excellent educational system, or the
effects of conservative feudalistic schools neglecting to teach students what healthy democratic habits feel like? For us Deweyan liberals, then, the basic educational challenge is educating the next generation to make our economic, political, and educational systems more democratic than they found them. That is modern democracy’s basic and on-going challenge. A few years ago a moderate Democratic president told the nation the era of big government is over. For us liberal democrats, the feudalistic era should be over.
Again, are we liberals really being too critical, or not critical enough? Aren't we really expecting too much from our government, financial sector, and our schools? How can we change those too-big-to-change bureaucracies, with their huge and powerful monopolies affecting everyone’s lives? After all, even Plato realized how difficult it was to make any kind of political improvements, even conservative ones. Eventually his solution was to deport everyone over 10 years of age, and then start educating them! For us liberal Deweyans, however, both schools and elections are our 2 most powerful weapons against conservative feudalistic power. With elections more liberal democratic politicians can keep passing more progressive laws, and local liberals can keep converting one conservative neighborhood school at a time, one grade at a time! That to us is intelligent democracy in action!
Some Economic Facts
How many high school students today know how, for decades now, corporations have been shipping more and more manufacturing jobs overseas to cheaper labor markets, thus throwing more and more people out of work, increasing their profits and salaries, and making good-paying jobs more difficult to find? And what’s more, how many of those students know how to intelligently start fighting back against those profit-obsessed results? How many know how important national, state, and local elections are, and how they can help promote the public good by electing more independent and liberal politicians, rather than merely sitting home on election day? How many students know our economic system often rewards those who are willing to openly lie and cheat and even be jailed, as long as they keep making profits for the company? After the Savings and Loan debacle in the 1980s ripped taxpayers off of some $70 billion, over 1,000 business leaders went to jail! How many students today know almost no CEOs have been jailed for creating the worst economic recession in history? How many college students know many university presidents are hired mainly because they know who to keep asking for university donations, rather than make education easier and more meaningful for more students? How many know feudalistic and undemocratic university boards of trustees keep voting themselves outlandish pay raises paid for with increased student fees? How many know student college debt in the US is now about $1 Trillion, and is enslaving them to years of debt payment? Habits of obedience to our feudalistic and undemocratic status quo make such results common and on-going everyday events!
No doubt, a modern-day cynic like Diogenes would be looking for an honorable capitalist or university president. The ancient and medieval conservative quest for philosophic certainty has recently been replaced by a modern conservative quest and obsession for ever more profits and money! Above all else, money! And how many students know such obsessive conservative habits are a sign of moral disease, not health?
For us Deweyan liberals, few young people today have any real useful knowledge about how an excellent democracy, economy, and educational system might work, and worse, how to intelligently help their evolution from feudalistic to democratic. Such important and relevant feelings and knowledge are all but ignored in our conservative schools. Young folks are coming out of our monastery-like conservative public schools almost totally disconnected psychically from what's going on in their own neighborhoods, much less on Wall Street and D.C. They’ve been continually diverted from learning such democratic habits with academic book-work. Is it any wonder more and more people are feeling disgusted, helpless, and dejected about democracy in general? Without having useful knowledge about making our conservative systems more democratic, disgust is a completely natural response! Without such habits it’s either become part of the system or ignore it.
The greedy habits of many rich folks, and their support of undemocratic school systems, in fact keeps students and adults confined to believing their knowledge of trivial facts is really what an excellent’well-rounded’ education is! No doubt, No Child Left Behind’s legal concrete hasn’t helped! For we Deweyan liberals that educational model is certainly less than excellent! For us, liberal educational excellence is knowing how to actively use such facts intelligently to keep increasing the democratic public good! Book-centered conservative educational habits, like docility and obedience, merely leave young folks more vulnerable to being taken advantage of by a wealthy class and a stream of economic scams! For such conservatives, the main challenge is hiring people to keep creating more scams and increasing their wealth! The recent crash of our housing market in 2007 is yet another stressful and frightening result of such habits. Too many people naively believed bankers really wanted to help them, when they mainly wanted to line their own pockets with more money, and get even more taxpayer bailout money by the government! Much has been repaid, but much hasn’t been repaid either.
In the last 40 years, since 1980, it's also become easier for politicians to keep using obscene amounts of tax money to fund our military-industrial complex. As a result, we’ve been fighting war after war after war all in the name of national security, helping increase the wealth of a small upper class, keep reducing taxes on the wealthy and useful economic regulations, increasing our public debt to obscene levels, and thus keep people tied to their jobs and paying off that public debt, much of which goes to those already obscenely wealthy! The educational point is: Our conservative book-dominated public schools are making the intelligent growth of more democratic political and economic systems even more difficult.
The US is now firmly divided into rich and poor classes, and our national government is largely controlled by the conservative and liberal wings of that upper class. If that isn't another result of economic class warfare, then what would be? Recently millions more are facing the probability of becoming homeless, like tens of thousands already are! As history teaches us, no democracy has become excellent with conservative feudalistic, undemocratic public schools, or with politicians depending on wealthy contributors to finance and propagandize their elections! In fact, with the creation of huge fortunes by a few families during the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s, and the help of 2 World Wars and numerous minor ones, our democratic republic has become a more feudalistic aristocracy than anything else! Feudalistic institutions didn’t die, they just kept growing in our modern era! Where is that fact in our public school history books; such books are, in fact, highly censored before they go to print.
That’s the bad news. But it’s not the only news! The good news is the people still have the power to keep educating themselves, focusing their collective power, and keep finding intelligent ways to keep making our economy, our politics, and our neighborhood schools more liberal and democratic, not less. Such schools begin educating the next generation with more intelligent democratic habits and knowledge, and thus help better protect them from dangerous concentrated and feudalistic economic, political, and educational power! That such schools should be built is the main thesis or idea of this book, as well as describing what such schools would look and act like, and how to start building them.
Educational Alternatives
So, what’s the best alternative to our conservative schools? Is it to make pre-school kids better at learning academic trivia, so a small percentage will go to college, or is it to build more liberal schools for everyone? Only people can answer that question for themselves. For we liberal Deweyans, however, the answer’s plain. The more democratic schools are built, the better most everyone will be in the long run. No doubt, many people may feel building such liberal schools will be very difficult, and it would be if parents and teachers tried doing it all at once, in all grades. But it doesn’t have to stay like that. In fact, it’s probably the worst way to build such schools. Better to build them one grade at a time, and one year at a time, starting with 1st grade, and then 1stand 2nd grade and so on. That way, teachers will better know what’s useful for 1st graders and can concentrate on 2nd graders instead, and so on.
No doubt, conservative types will choose to give their kids more pre-school book experience, but again, it’s not the only or best educational alternative open to liberal democrats. For liberals there will be obstacles to overcome; what else is new? In any case, what’s most important is people power; if enough people want them, then liberal schools can be built, or conservative schools can become more liberal. As Section 41 will show us, that’s probably the biggest obstacle of all – popular support and will power. Once that’s achieved, however, then any neighborhood school can start slowly becoming more liberal, and giving parents and children more educational power over what is learned, and how it’s learned!
As we’ve seen, in the early 1900s such liberal democratic schools began growing in many US cities and rural areas, but as the 1900s entered its second half, after Dewey died, the cold war began, and Russia launched Sputnik 1, conservatives in effect declared war on Dewey’s ideas and liberal schools. Any liberal habits are, in fact, a threat to their concentrated and feudalistic power; much of it depends on regimented and obedient students, not independent and democratic ones. With such liberal schools, however, it certainly would have been much more difficult for naïve President Johnson to send over 50,000 young Americans to their death in Vietnam, kill perhaps a million Vietnamese, and injure and cripple tens of thousands more! In fact, for us liberals the whole feudal capitalistic economic model works better with passive people often accepting and doing what they’re told; call NOW! Hurry, hurry, hurry! For conservatives in general, obedience to the status quo is the highest good, so democratic equal rights of any kind threaten their own power, in economics, politics, and education.
The wealthy may send their children to expensive pre-schools, but less wealthy people should know: Building more liberal neighborhood schools is not only an option, but it’s do-able! Why bother? Because they make our democracy even stronger and people more intelligent! Based on better personal and social results in such schools, we say young folks can start learning how to actively and intelligently become their own best therapist and teacher, and what it means to grow healthy intelligent habits. Why shouldn’t they learn to keep intelligently guiding their own growth, and mastering their own weak,
excessive, and unhealthful habits, as well as keep making our still feudalistic institutions more democratic and helpful to all law-abiding people? If not, then we’ll continue seeing people dominating and manipulating others just to take their money, or worse, their lives in more unnecessary wars. After all, most all children go to public schools, so why not teach them such skills before they graduate, so they’re better able to avoid life’s dangers.
Aren't those the kinds of educational questions more people should be asking themselves about the neighborhood schools their own hard-earned taxes pay for, and how they can be improved for everyone's benefit? Why keep believing wealthy folks have all the advantages in life, when in fact they don’t. Why keep believing our elected leaders always know what’s best for us? The fact is, more often than not, they’re more concerned about pleasing the wealthy and powerful, and their place in history. As we’re seeing, in this present serious and deep recession caused by a few powerful under-regulated feudalistic banks and corporations, more teachers are being laid off, and thus making it even more difficult to keep improving our public schools. Is that yet another result conservatives like to see, as well as breaking the power of teacher unions? Shouldn’t more people be asking such questions about those who want to build more non-union charter schools?
Making a Fresh Start
No doubt, more liberal schools can be built! It's basically a question of teaching parents, students, and liberal wealthy folks what they might look like, and then mobilizing their own social power to start experimenting with them at the primary level. Dewey's psychological ideas about habits help build a foundation for such experiments. His liberal educational model for public schools focused on building more intelligent and democratic habits with intelligent experimentation. The truth he saw was simple enough: unless young folks get some active and intelligent experimental training and practice building healthful character habit-arts, life will become more difficult for everyone! After all, it really doesn’t take much to teach students how important and intelligent it is to respect just laws, how to relax and enjoy intelligently building useful social projects, like community gardens and day-care centers, how to intelligently exercise and eat, as well as practice economic and political health. The more such habits aren't taught, the more everyone pays for the often destructive, wasteful, and disrespectful results, like more police, courts, and prisons. Are you actively with such thinking, or still staying passive?
For Dewey all habits and their knowledge are organic human arts; they're something most everyone can build and keep improving, even young folks. Just that one fact alone attacks the entire conservative model of passive learning with books. For us liberals, everyone best learns what they know only with actively intelligent practice! Thus, liberal school students are allowed to become much more active and experimental, rather than passively reading day after day. His own educational experiments showed him children are actively experimental by nature, and so the main challenge was to teach them to experiment intelligently, rather than routinely; with first building an intelligent plan, and then testing it. What’s more, if young folks actively practice such learning, with constructive and socially helpful projects, then their knowledge is not only excellent, but their social sense grows as well! In fact, ignoring those basic facts of child psychology and active learning have helped keep conservative educational ideas and habits in place. High drop-out rates in schools around the country, as well as low test scores, continue telling us it’s not the best educational model.
For Dewey it’s also important to know habits are both liberating and confining! It sounds strange, but it’s true. Habits help liberate young folks from childhood ignorance, but at the same time they confine their feelings to those new habits! For example, if the conservative habit of believing there exists only one real system of Truth, then students become confined by it, as the history of Christianity or any religion keeps showing us. And the more that happens, the more difficult it becomes to build more tolerant democratic organizations, where every law-abiding person deserves their equal rights! Even a philanthropic habit, for example, restricts a person’s selfishness, while a smoking habit restricts a person’s learning more healthful and enjoyable habits. It’s just basic Behavioral psychology.
Thus, like all other creatures, humans too are both liberated and limited by the habits they practice. It’s what makes early education so important. Book-learning habits, for example, limit students from learning, knowing, and building more intelligent character habits. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, for example, built a conservative thinking habit about slavery, thus limiting their liberal humane feelings for democratic equal rights from growing.
So, for us liberals, life’s basic educational challenge is to start teaching intelligent liberal habits as soon as possible in our public primary schools, and thus help produce more satisfying and enjoyable personal and social results for everyone. Such habits aren't about knowing eternal and unchanging kinds of Truth, and thus trying to dominate others with them, but rather helping students to intelligently learn to share the rights they have with others while learning what they want to learn. Thus they become more independent, civilized, tolerant, and intelligent democratic adults. We Deweyan liberals say that educational goal is best accomplished with the active intelligent practice of experimental learning. That liberal idea is at the core of this educational model.
Overcoming Our Conservative Habits of Obedience
For about the last 5,000 years a basic educational challenge has increased as towns and cities grew, and small feudalistic systems of power evolved. Those in power needed to learn how to keep such power, so the need for schools increased. However, with the recent evolution of modern Behavioral psychology, and knowing people learn only what they actively practice, we today have a better psychological foundation for teaching students how to keep intelligently expanding and improving their knowledge all through life, rather than merely remaining obedient to those with more social power. With the growth of that experimental learning psychology, and its learning techniques of rewarding good actions, we now have more intelligent ways for teaching more liberal tolerant and democratic habits and ideas to the next generation. With such habits they can then keep experimentally learning how to keep improving themselves and their democracy. With the very important learning habit-art of intelligent experimentation, not only excessive and unhealthful food, alcohol, drug, and smoking habits can be more easily improved, but also our own
feudalistic political, economic, and educational systems can be made more democratic as well, and thus made to work for the common good, rather than for the confined personal good of a small wealthy upper class.
That's basically today’s liberal educational challenge; we’re all part of the same species, have the same needs, and thus should have the same rights as anyone else. The bad news is our history of education teaches us conservative schools have continued working against teaching such democratic habit-arts, focusing instead on teaching students to blindly obey teachers who are now required by law to make most all students learn routine and trivial academic book-facts. When’s the last time you talked about Shakespeare in daily life? As a result, keeping feudal, accepting, war-like, and passive habits in place has become easier. Phrases like perpetual warfare, for example, have lately become much more common for politicians, thus making it easier for weapons makers to keep taking billions more of the public’s tax money and keep people more fearful and stressful than necessary.
Today, it’s most important to know the conservative-liberal battle for more democracy is far from over; in fact in many ways it's just beginning. Millions of people around the world are now seeing more liberal democratic schools not only can be built, but are the best way to keep all democratic improvements in place and working! What’s more, people can start building them at the local level; they’re improvements possible now, not 5 or 10 years later. In them students learn how to keep intelligently guiding their own and democracy’s growth with active intelligent experimentation! In them more intelligent and democratic personal and social habits are actively learned, not just redd about. (my spelling for the past tense of read) In them students keep expanding and improving their own weak, excessive, and unhealthful habit-limits, as well as keep working to make all forms of local concentrated feudalistic power more democratic. Local corporations may better help and feed more people, but why shouldn’t they too be run more democratically, so everyone loses during recessions, instead of just the workers?
As we’ll see throughout these pages, there's a whole set of excellent, constructive, and positive habits possible for young folks to learn, helping make life more healthful and more respectful of people and just laws. Moreover, when actively learned with intelligent practice, such liberal habits encourage students to keep asking more intelligent questions about what's going on both politically and economically in their own neighborhoods. And the more that happens, the easier it becomes to intelligently help those less well off, and learn what intelligent kindness, sympathy, and democratic equal rights actually feel like. It’s one thing to merely read about them, but when actively practiced such knowledge becomes more deeply felt.
Without knowing how active intelligent experimental learning best keeps expanding our always limited habits, both people and their nation remain confined to old ancient and feudalistic and medieval systems of power, and their production of more dangerous, undemocratic, stressful, and unhealthful results. Feudalistic societies cared more for the ruling good, and little for the public good. Just recently, as people meekly accepted 2 unnecessary and brutal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, taxpayer debt has become obscenely oppressive, while a small conservative wealthy class and politicians continued saying the government must stop helping people find jobs while allowing very profitable corporations to put their profits in tax-free offshore banks! Thus our public debt remains artificially high for everyone! Such are some results of our feudalistic national government, and they’re the kinds of actions liberal democratic schools teach students to actively end. What moral right has any organization to neglect equal rights and the public good?
Another Liberal Idea: Character Training
Character training is another very important practice in liberal schools. Children of our small primitive nomadic hunting and gathering ancestors of the past 2 million years didn't need such training. Every character habit they learned for survival was learned actively, with encouraging practice from adults. However, as agricultural habits grew and people began building villages, towns, cities, and ruling classes, new and different educational needs grew. Such
rulers needed to teach people how and why they should support them, and so different religious systems evolved to help build such conservative character habits, helping justify a feudalistic social status quo. Small governing priest and ruling classes, for example, needed to convince farmers they should be supported, and so all kinds of myths were created. Some said such rulers and their rituals actually postpone the end of world, while others said they also protect their people.
And, along with such myths, rulers also needed to know how much food to take from farmers so they wouldn't have to grow their own; mathematics and surveying thus became important subjects to learn. Records were also kept of how much was grown, and who paid what, thus creating the educational need for scribes to learn writing, calculating, and measuring skills; the ancient Egyptians soon became very good as teaching such knowledge and skills to a small group of young men, and accepting character habits to most everyone else. The first conservative feudalistic schools thus taught very practical kinds of knowledge, but only to a very small class of students. For most everyone else, learning the skills and character habits necessary for living still rested on actively practicing them, usually within one's family and social kin group.
Such obedient and accepting habits all helped support feudalistic social systems. Character habits like obeying the laws, fair business practices, and being polite and respectful to one's neighbors and foreigners became more important to learn. In Babylon, for example, such laws were written and displayed publicly around 2,000 BCE. And so, people could read about what character habits they needed, especially passive obedience to a feudal social structure, as well as how to treat slaves, women, children, rulers, and priests. Class-based city-living thus called for obedience to such habit-arts, like not even looking at one's ruler.
At the same time, no doubt, many also began realizing there’s a big difference in results produced by constructive, helpful, and kind habits, and those produced by destructive, mean, unkind, and war-like habits. Eventually ancient Greeks like Democritus, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle began creating different models of character excellence, liberals emphasizing liberal democratic and questioning habits, while conservatives and moderates emphasizing obedience to old feudalistic ones. For liberals like Democritus, for example, it seemed clear: educational excellence taught all young folks not only how to keep intelligently expanding their own confining habits, and also character habits useful for building a more humane and democratic society. Thus different forms of character became more clearly defined and described. Christianity’s founder Paul of Tarsus summarized a conservative idea: Slaves, be obedient to you masters.
Why mention such facts? Simply because many people today don’t realize different educational models exist, and how important different character habits are to we liberals! As a result, many people today don't realize different kinds of character habits exist, and they can be formally taught in our schools! Blindly obeying their teachers and passively learning more and more book-facts builds character habits making democracy and equal rights even more difficult to produce! In fact, for us Deweyan liberals, the lack of formal liberal democratic character habits and training has become a major weakness in our conservative public schools; they grow when most all students are made to learn the same set of trivial academic facts. As we’ve seen, however, the wasteful and stressful personal and social results of that kind of character training keeps wasting much of our precious educational tax monies, leaves young folks unprepared for life in the modern world, and almost forces us to keep building more prisons and hospitals. Liberal schools aim to improve those results with both character and health studies in our neighborhood public schools.
Without learning more liberal character and health habits, it’s much easier for young folks to disrespect our just laws, build unhealthful and excessive diet habits, and thus increase the need for more prisons and hospitals. Also, without teaching such character habits, more people need to rely on more government health and penal programs to reduce their harmful and dangerous social results, like increased crime and disease. We liberals say such weak and unhealthful social results are helped when our conservative schools, homes, and churches continue teaching mainly academic facts; in such schools children are practically passively enslaved to their books, thus creating weak character habits in too many young folks.
If so, then our own conservative schools continue making life unnecessarily stressful and dangerous, as well as confining the next generation to feudalistic habits of obedience to the social, economic, and political status quo. To us liberals, such results are completely unacceptable; they are not the habits a healthy and intelligent democracy needs for making a more peaceful and cooperative world. We say more people should know, many people continue making taxpayer money from such weak character habits, like police, judges, and prison guards, as well as doctors and lawyers. With the help of our politicians, and of course many of their conservative contributors, our schools have remained much too conservative in practice for at least the last 50 years, teaching mainly obedience to teachers offering more and more academic book-facts, like when the dinosaurs lived, patriotic stories about our own history, and useless mathematical skills like how to solve quadratic equations. For those interested in reading more about our educational weaknesses John Holt’s books are useful, as is Dewey's Democracy and Education. This book too will keep suggesting more ways our schools can start building much more useful democratic character habits.
The Media: More Educational Tools
Thanks to modern science, schools aren’t the only educational tools we liberals have. Some of our popular media offers more information for making our nation more democratic and satisfying for all. Even though many are now owned by conservatives focused mostly on making more money and convincing the public conservatives have the best ideas, other more liberal media outlets are telling a different picture of what’s going on out there. However conservative much of it may be for better educating people about the real results of conservative ideas, some TV, newspapers, and the Internet continue informing people with a more liberal picture. With some of the more liberal outlets, like public TV and liberal online sources like The Nation, Truthdig.com, and Mother Jones.com, it's become much easier to help people keep learning about the results our feudalistic economic, political, and educational systems are producing, and equally important, what kinds of active protests and actions are possible.
With such outlets our own liberal history is seen more clearly. For example, early in the 1900s liberal newspapers helped grow a very strong and vibrant progressive political and educational movement; Dewey’s writings helped as well. In fact it continues growing today in many places around the world; there’s a healthy progressive congressional minority as well as an electorate. After all, the more people elect more liberal politicians, labor leaders, and school boards like they did in the 1930s, the more they focused on the public good and the more democratic life became. Thanks to such liberal media outlets our conservative feudalistic world has changed much since Plato's day, and democracy is blooming and growing as never before, making it much easier to keep growing liberal reform movements on the most important level of all -- on the local neighborhood level! If the conservative-liberal ratio in ancient Greece was 90% to 10%, then today’s ration may be 60% to 40%. But as we’ve seen, stressful conservative results are still too dangerous for millions of people, and so our liberal work building more democratic institutions is far from done, especially building more liberal schools. That’s where such educational reforms and improvements can most easily be controlled and grown of, by, and for the people.
True, our popular media could be helping that process more, but in many ways their increasing number of conservative corporate sponsors prevents that from happening. How many TV-owning-network corporations like General Electric, who make billions building more bombs and weapons, put conservative politicians on TV talk shows telling people we need more bombs and weapons, paid for, of course, by taxpayers? And, how many conservative-owned TV stations put more trivial high-interest shows on the air merely for more profits? After all, the more people are entertained, the easier it is to sell them more corporate goods, like cars, cosmetics, and even a war. Recently a show about one very conservative billionaire Koch brother was stopped from airing; too many people might learn too much about the conservative agenda, and how some people keep using their wealth to make it work.
Thus, with conservative media control, it becomes easier to keep their feudalistic social systems in place, even though they often help with disaster relief and important subjects like equal sexual rights. But the question can be asked: why not use our public airwaves to also teach socially useful and helpful character habits too, like respecting just laws? True, TV can only show people what character excellence looks like; it can’t actually teach what they feel like, like our public schools can with active experimentation! But even mentioning would be a help.
No doubt, many of our daily network TV shows are helping more people learn about healthful and unhealthful habits and actions. But, without actively teaching such ideas like respect and how to intelligently help others, such ideas remain just that, mere ideas. How much do such dramatic soap operas actually help build a more democratic republic? Shouldn’t students be free to watch useful shows about, say, basic Behavioral psychology; shows about how money works in today’s world; intelligent child-rearing practices, and healthy food shows too? After all, public TV is funded with tax monies, so why aren’t they giving the next generation more useful information about living intelligently in a profit-obsessed economic system? Instead, we continue getting more high interest shows like what someone thinks their antique objects are worth, and how some animals kill other animals! About such shows, how many remain underwhelmed?
More liberal and practical people see such shows as merely diverting attention from teaching people what’s important to know for making life more democratic and less feudalistic. For example, how do wealthy folks use money to convince politicians to vote their way, and how a 2 tier stock market of the rich and everyone makes it easy to keep taking peoples’money? How much insider trading is there on Wall Street, and how do the very wealthy keep getting wealthier? Isn’t such knowledge really the first step to taking a more intelligent control of our lives? Personally, I’ve also given up on watching royal coronations, royal marriages, and pope funerals and elections; I’m all poped-out, so to speak! Better liberal schools are one antidote to such public-funded kinds of uselessness. They can be used best
to help students understand how our system works, and how to make it more democratic and equal for everyone.
The more young folks are distracted from learning more about what’s going on out there, the more difficult it becomes to keep improving it. What's often left out of network news stories is seeing how people can themselves intelligently start experimenting to produce more democratic and constructive results with their actions. Often people are simply
directed to people who can help, often for a price.
More Useful Liberal Subjects
We Deweyan liberals say the main focus of education needs to change if people and our nation is to keep becoming healthier and more democratic. For us more useful subjects can be taught in our public schools, rather than teaching an array of disconnected and shallow book-facts. Such liberal schools can focus on teaching 4 useful kinds of intelligent health, and teaching them actively and experimentally, in addition to allowing students more freedom to study what they want to study. Thus liberal schools can aim at building intelligent habits of physical, psychological, economic, and political health. Otherwise the small number of wealthy people who run our still largely feudal systems will continue exploiting anyone they can to keep increasing their own economic and political power, instead of increasing the public good. How easy is it for, say, doctors to keep taking advantage of people who are health-ignorant, and thus keep healthcare costs artificially high? Isn’t that basically why government health programs are so expensive?
In liberal schools intelligently learning more about those 4 healthy habits before they graduate and begin their adult careers can become most important. Whatever they choose to learn about, whether it’s clothing, food service, banking, doctoring, or lawyering, students can also start learning some basics about those 4 kinds of health. For example, how to actively practice intelligent eating and exercise habits; how to practice psychological health by enjoying work, talking positively, and with some humor! Psychological health also means practicing ethically excellent habits, like helping those less well off, and what it means in action to respect others and just laws. They’ll learn more about Behavioral psychology like intelligently using enjoyable rewards to make learning a new habit feel comfortable. They’ll also begin learning about economic kinds of health, like working not only for their own well-being, but also the public good; and also democratic health, like how to keep building more democratic neighborhood political systems to better work for the public good, rather than for just a small number of people. Such knowledge is useful throughout life, to keep building better character habits, and also for making our nation more democratic and sharing, rather than feudalistic and greedy. Can education get any more well-rounded than that?
With sciences like Behavioral psychology and intelligent experimental learning, even young grade-school students can begin learning about what excellent liberal character habit-arts to grow, and how to enjoy building them as well. If intelligent habits are the only way anyone becomes more intelligent, then why not learn to enjoy building them? Learning to use rewards intelligently in that process is very useful information. That habit-art in itself would be a great educational improvement to any school. After all, we all live with our confining habits all through life, so why not learn how to intelligentlykeep expanding those we want to learn more about, like excellent economic and political habits? No matter what business a child wants to go into, there are economic and political factors. So, the more they know about them, the easier and less stressful life itself becomes, and the less need there'll be to depend on government kinds of help for teaching young folks what they could and should have learned in school! To us Deweyan liberals such habits are most important.
Building a healthful diet is one example; it’s a sign of physical health. It’s one thing to merely read about the dangerous results of addictive overeating and obesity, but they’re merely ideas, without the feelings necessary for true wisdom and knowledge. However, with an active, intelligent, and enjoyable experimental learning habit, helping students actually grow, cook, and eat healthy food, students can actually start turning mere ideas and cold facts into deep and propulsive feelings and habits; into will power itself! After all, it takes everyone years to build bad diet habits, so why shouldn’t it take years to learn better ones, while also learning what results corporate-made junk food might be producing in their bodies?
In short, the best way to start improving bad eating habits is with more enjoyable healthful actions, and learning such habit-arts is what liberal schools are all about. The lack of such active, enjoyable, and intelligent practice in our conservative schools is, to us liberal Deweyans, our greatest educational weakness in them. Such schools too can be built with a little intelligent and enjoyable baby-step experimentation, one small step at a time.
Almost daily as I shop for food, I’m amazed at how much dietary junk there is for sale; so much of it is sugar, fat, and salt laden. How many prostate problems are caused by white sugar alone? A Deweyan liberal model of education simply asks, why not teach young folks healthful physical, psychological, economic, and political habits, so they can become more intelligent people? Isn’t that a much better definition of academic well-roundedness than merely having a head full of academic trivia? Don’t rising obesity and disease-related health problems tell us such schools are needed now more than ever before?
What’s more, with such active studies whole new fields of useful academic facts begin opening up, like primate evolution, human biology, and chemistry as well! Why put all those hard-to-pronounce chemicals into foods, and what the hell are they doing in our bodies? Students who know how to enjoy practicing experimentally intelligent learning know how to keep asking intelligent questions, and thus keep guiding and improving their own healthy habits, become their own learning masters, and so feel much more independent and confident to keep learning what they want to learn all through life. In today's rapidly changing world, where the continual hunt for more profits remains a kind of economic god, the excellent habit of self-education is, perhaps, the most important skill to have. Colleges are becomes too expensive for many students, and so self-education becomes a very useful habit. And with good Behavioral habits such students will know how to enjoy learning new skills and knowledge, and how to control their own weak, excessive, and unhealthful actions even after they're out of school. Or would we rather keep student habits and knowledge confined to reading about more academic facts and keep adult life both physically and psychically weak and stunted? As we know now, nature has given most everyone the mental tools to learn such healthfully propulsive habit-arts; no one is a slave by nature! For us Deweyan liberals, then, the educational challenge is to actually start teaching those habit-arts one grade at a time, one year at a time. What 1st grader can’t learn to say intelligent experimentation is the best way to learn?
After all, it’s either that, or keep students sitting passively at their desks year after year while greedy conservatives keep creating more and more ways to keep taking more of the public’s money. In the 1920s, for example, most everyone believed their stocks would never go down in value! Those kinds of naïve and unrealistic ideas celebrated by conservative politicians merely made it easier for exploitative feudalistic stock markets to continue taking more money until it collapsed in 1929. And because our military-supporting corporations remain good at the art of taking the public’s money to build more weapons, war itself remains an unintelligent option in every generation. Have you noticed yet the similarity between classroom rows and seats and military marching formations? I certainly have. For all practical purposes they’re the same. No doubt, sometimes we need soldiers, but to regiment everyone, men and women alike, and keep teaching them habits of obedience only makes it easier for all kinds of obedience to continue on, especially economic and political obedience.
Every democratic republic needs such liberal schools, or else they’ll remain basically feudalistic societies. Please think about this. About 2 million able-bodied young folks are now wasting their time and tax-payer money in our prisons, many of whom keep returning to prison time and time again. That fact alone should make people think more about making their own neighborhood public schools better at teaching useful intelligent character habits, like how to make an honest living, help those less well off, and how to make our own neighborhoods more satisfying for everyone! After all, if a child learns how to intelligently build just one excellent healthful habit-art, like diet, exercise, or even auto or computer repair, then such knowledge will more easily affect all the child’s learning; that’s how organic and interrelated life is. As the great film maker Woody Allen poetically said, you need to build your own survival kit! Such kits are composed of a person’s own character habits.
In short, then, liberal educational excellence is about teaching young folks how to use academic facts when they’re needed, like for their own or the public good, not merely when the teacher says learn them. Such liberal schools help build student independence, confidence, and intelligence, and best of all, they put academic book facts in their place, as merely tools for building a better world, not for merely learning more and more of them. In a very real sense such healthy habits increase student chances not only for survival, but for a more satisfying life for everyone. Every time a student or a prisoner is treated as an individual, with their own personal learning needs and wants, the dawn of modern education and prison reform becomes brighter. To be sure, however, liberal Deweyan schools or prisons aren’t about simply letting children learn only what they want; for Dewey that educational indulgence! It helps waste real human potential. Liberal schools should be about teaching students how to intelligently make themselves and their neighborhoods as excellent as they want to be. We are social creatures, so why not learn how to be socially intelligent? That is the most intelligent weapon against any feudalistic system.
The Road Ahead
With such introductory remarks we can more clearly begin seeing some of our challenges and obstacles, as well as some useful tools for overcoming them. Such liberal ideas will also make it easier for the reader to walk over the educational road ahead. The basic goal of this book is to give parents and students some useful knowledge about Dewey’s liberal educational options, so they can begin using them at home, compare them to what’s going on in their own neighborhood schools, and perhaps even start experimenting to improve them with more liberal ideas and habits.
The basic plan is this: First, sections 2-4 will give some information about conservative, moderate, and liberal educational models. The less students and parents know about them, the more conservative schools will stay in place. With a little educational history people can easily begin seeing a few fundamentally important differences between those models. Moreover, such differences are simple to state and understand. Like never before, modern democracy is blooming around the world, and so millions of people are now challenged to make them true and lasting democracies, and here at home to keep lessening the power of our own feudalistic systems. For all such challenges, all schools become tremendously important! The more the next generation is educated to practice liberal kinds of democratic health, the stronger democracy becomes. That’s the great educational challenge facing people around the world today, even in the US! Even here, democratic equal rights are still not a solid and on-going reality, much less economic and educational equality.
No doubt, conservatives and moderates will keep working against building such power-sharing schools, governments, and corporations; many of them feel the Truth has already been discovered, and so our schools should teach only their model of it. But in our new modern age of science, where intelligent experimental learning now produces our strongest knowledge, all such conservative book-centered models can be confidently challenged wherever they’re found; the only habit best conserved in an always changing nature is the habit-art of intelligent experimentation! The more students are actively taught to feel that liberal idea and how it works, the easier it becomes to keep building more flexible and stable democratic schools, corporations, and political systems. It's our new modern educational challenge, just like beginning to live in towns and cities challenged our ancient and medieval ancestors to build schools themselves.
A brief glance at educational history in those sections will help us see such challenges haven’t yet been answered as well as they could be. And they won’t be without more liberal schools educating students to actually practice democratic equal rights in all our institutions -- economic, political, and educational. Why shouldn’t workers, for example, have equal power to help guide their corporations and thus better preserve their jobs and salaries? Without such equal power they too may go to work one day and see their jobs have vanished while their leaders made millions selling stock to their workers, as happened at the Enron corporation!
Then, after that educational history, we’ll look at more weaknesses in our conservative book-centered schools, and also begin seeing how they can be improved with building more liberal schools in sections 5-13. The idea of teaching children useful character habits, in addition to knowledge and skills, is one such idea. In fact, we all pay a high social and economic price when all three skills aren't formally taught.
Then from there we’ll describe more about character excellence in sections 13-19, and how children can be taught to experimentally use their book-facts to actually make life a little better, both in and outside of school. After that, in sections 20-24, more will be said about liberal kinds of ideas, like enjoyable learning, tool use, and the general aim of health itself. Naturally, with such information we’ll be criticizing the conservative and moderate educational models practiced for most of the past 5,000 years! To us they merely represent the ways conservatives have kept their economic, educational, and political power. What’s more, people no longer need support such feudal and undemocratic systems and the obnoxious and destructive results they often produce, for both students and adults.
We’ll see what most deserves criticism are conservative schools teaching mainly academic facts, rather than teaching how their knowledge, skills, and character habits can be used to keep improving any local, state, and national social and political system. We are now living in a very interactive and connected world, so why keep students from learning more about what’s going on out there, and instead keep them passively learning the same academic book-facts and trivia, year after year after year? Is that really educational excellence? To us Deweyan liberals it’s essentially a feudal model practiced extensively during the Middle Ages; today, however, in conservative public schools trivial academic facts have replaced religious ideas as the educational god.
Then in Section 25 we’ll see how such conservative schools rest on a false faulty psychology and learning model, both built in the ancient world by Plato and Aristotle. Section 26 will then compare conservative and liberal models of teaching, the first being basically passive, and the second being more active and experimental, as will sections 27-34. Then in sections 35-40 more will be said about liberal educational options, called here Reality Schools, after which Section 41 will talk more about actually building such schools, and Section 42 offering a brief summary of Dewey’s liberal philosophic ideas.
Now, more than ever before, such schools needed. Economic and political life has changed much in the past 40 years, since 1980. As millions have learned in the last few years, a newly deregulated financial sector has in fact endangered the homes and lives of many millions of people both here and around the world! In economically wrecked Greece, many more young folks are turning to drugs and prostitution just for food money! Big banks convinced millions of people to invest in a home, even if they couldn’t make their mortgage payments. As a result, many have lost their homes and savings as well. Thus economics has become a much more useful study for everyone; making and keeping gross profits has become the new secular god, so many need to know more about it to make their actions more intelligent.
Also, obscene amounts of wealth for a few have made it easier for politicians to be influenced and even bought outright; the US has more billionaires than anyone, over 600 and counting. Thus, political and democratic health has become much more important for people to know about as we continue digging out from high amounts of joblessness, both personal and social debt, and economic chaos, made even tougher by conservative politicians not helping create jobs so debts can be reduced! Improving such results have definitely become major challenges for all students and parents.
Character training is another very important practice in liberal schools. Children of our small primitive nomadic hunting and gathering ancestors of the past 2 million years didn't need such training. Every character habit they learned for survival was learned actively, with encouraging practice from adults. However, as agricultural habits grew and people began building villages, towns, cities, and ruling classes, new and different educational needs grew. Such rulers needed to teach people how and why they should support them, and so different religious systems evolved to help build such conservative character habits, helping justify a feudalistic social status quo. Small governing priest and ruling classes, for example, needed to convince farmers they should be supported, and so all kinds of myths were created. Some said such rulers and their rituals actually postpone the end of world, while others said they also protect their people. And, along with such myths, rulers also needed to know how much food to take from farmers so they wouldn't have to grow their own; mathematics and surveying thus became important subjects to learn. Records were also kept of how much was grown, and who paid what, thus creating the educational need for scribes to learn writing, calculating, and measuring skills; the ancient Egyptians soon became very good as teaching such knowledge and skills to a small group of young men, and accepting character habits to most everyone else. The first conservative feudalistic schools thus taught very practical kinds of knowledge, but only to a very small class of students. For most everyone else, learning the skills and character habits necessary for living still rested on actively practicing them, usually within one's family and social kin group.
Such obedient and accepting habits all helped support feudalistic social systems. Character habits like obeying the laws, fair business practices, and being polite and respectful to one's neighbors and foreigners became more important to learn. In Babylon, for example, such laws were written and displayed publicly around 2,000 BCE. And so, people could read about what character habits they needed, especially passive obedience to a feudal social structure, as well as how to treat slaves, women, children, rulers, and priests. Class-based city-living thus called for obedience to such habit-arts, like not even looking at one's ruler.
At the same time, no doubt, many also began realizing there’s a big difference in results produced by constructive, helpful, and kind habits, and those produced by destructive, mean, unkind, and war-like habits. Eventually ancient Greeks like Democritus, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle began creating different models of character excellence, liberals emphasizing liberal democratic and questioning habits, while conservatives and moderates emphasizing obedience to old feudalistic ones. For liberals like Democritus, for example, it seemed clear: educational excellence taught all young folks not only how to keep intelligently expanding their own confining habits, and also character habits useful for building a more humane and democratic society. Thus different forms of character became more clearly defined and described. Christianity’s founder Paul of Tarsus summarized a conservative idea: Slaves, be obedient to you masters.
Why mention such facts? Simply because many people today don’t realize different educational models exist, and how important different character habits are to we liberals! As a result, many people today don't realize different kinds of character habits exist, and they can be formally taught in our schools! Blindly obeying their teachers and passively learning more and more book-facts builds character habits making democracy and equal rights even more difficult to produce! In fact, for us Deweyan liberals, the lack of formal liberal democratic character habits and training has become a major weakness in our conservative public schools; they grow when most all students are made to learn the same set of trivial academic facts. As we’ve seen, however, the wasteful and stressful personal and social results of that kind of character training keeps wasting much of our precious educational tax monies, leaves young folks unprepared for life in the modern world, and almost forces us to keep building more prisons and hospitals. Liberal schools aim to improve those results with both character and health studies in our neighborhood public schools.
Without learning more liberal character and health habits, it’s much easier for young folks to disrespect our just laws, build unhealthful and excessive diet habits, and thus increase the need for more prisons and hospitals. Also, without teaching such character habits, more people need to rely on more government health and penal programs to reduce their harmful and dangerous social results, like increased crime and disease. We liberals say such weak and unhealthful social results are helped when our conservative schools, homes, and churches continue teaching mainly academic facts; in such schools children are practically passively enslaved to their books, thus creating weak character habits in too many young folks.
If so, then our own conservative schools continue making life unnecessarily stressful and dangerous, as well as confining the next generation to feudalistic habits of obedience to the social, economic, and political status quo. To us liberals, such results are completely unacceptable; they are not the habits a healthy and intelligent democracy needs for making a more peaceful and cooperative world. We say more people should know, many people continue making taxpayer money from such weak character habits, like police, judges, and prison guards, as well as doctors and lawyers. With the help of our politicians, and of course many of their conservative contributors, our schools have remained much too conservative in practice for at least the last 50 years, teaching mainly obedience to teachers offering more and more academic book-facts, like when the dinosaurs lived, patriotic stories about our own history, and useless mathematical skills like how to solve quadratic equations. For those interested in reading more about our educational weaknesses John Holt’s books are useful, as is Dewey's Democracy and Education. This book too will keep suggesting more ways our schools can start building much more useful democratic character habits.
Also, obscene amounts of wealth for a few have made it easier for politicians to be influenced and even bought outright; the US has more billionaires than anyone, over 600 and counting. Thus, political and democratic health has become much more important for people to know about as we continue digging out from high amounts of joblessness, both personal and social debt, and economic chaos, made even tougher by conservative politicians not helping create jobs so debts can be reduced! Improving such results have definitely become major challenges for all students and parents.
2. EDUCATION HIGHLIGHTS: ANCIENT
In this and the next 3 sections we go into a little of education's history, and see why a conservative book-centered idea model has remained so powerful in Western public schools, even in our present Age of Experimental Science. Some habits do indeed die hard. For us liberals the reason is rather simple: not enough people today know about other educational models, especially Dewey’s liberal democratic one! In truth, Western civilization has been growing for about 5 thousand years, and all through that time not only have book-factsbeen the most important ideas to teach students, but educating only a small class of aristocratic males was dominant too! Most everyone else learned the family trade and so had no idea there were conservative, moderate, and liberal models of both life and nature; only in ancient Greece did such models evolve, and conservatives all but killed any other model. Through it all, however, one fact has remained constant: people needed to be educated about democracy and a more liberal feeling of human equality for a more liberal educational model to be built at all! In short, only with education’s help with democracy continue growing or withering.
Liberal Models
Often for those wealthier students who had individual
tutors, such academic facts and ideas were also made to feel like the eternal
and unchanging Truth about life and nature. Even after liberal philosophic models
were built by Atomists like Democritus, and humanist sophists like Protagoras,
conservatives and moderates like Plato and Aristotle soon attacked such
democratic models as not capable of teaching such Truth.
And they then build philosophic models of human nature to help justify
their own ideas of educational excellence. For such people, conservative ideas and
habits were the best knowledge and wisdom from past ancestors, and they were
felt to be the best knowledge to know.
In fact, many religious people throughout the world still study the ideas
of their forefathers, often assuming some of their ideas were divinely inspired;
in that way they too helped justify the status quo habits they were taught. In ancient Greece even the gods were
restricted by nature's fate.
Beginning in the 500s BCE, liberal and secular Western
science and philosophy began blooming; both would eventually help create liberal
democratic models of educational excellence. Perhaps the 2 greatest such thinkers
were Democritus the Atomist (c460 - c370 BCE) and Protagoras the Sophist (c490 –
c420 BCE). They laid the liberal foundation not only for modern science and Humanism, but also for Dewey's
liberal philosophic models. For both of them educational excellence was practical, experimentally active, and naturalistic, rather than contemplative, quiet, and spirit-oriented. So, even at its founding, the liberal education model aimed at making everyone's habits stronger and more useful.
Protagoras, for example, traveled from city to city and
taught anyone who wanted more useful knowledge for living in a democratic
society to strengthen their weak speaking and thinking skills, making them
clearer and more logical. That way they could participate intelligently not only in better running their cities,
but also better at defending themselves in court! For him knowledge was always growing and changing, like nature itself, and so our senses were most important for helping people see and feel how their
own habits could be improved for the better. Unlike Plato, such liberals simply
trusted what their senses were telling them about nature:
we had no objective evidence eternal and unchanging objects
existed, and so natural movements were the best objects of knowledge, especially
political and educational ones. Again, it was practical knowledge; without their senses showing people
what was actually happening in the natural world, people would more easily be
controlled by the powerful and conservative wealthy and religious upper
classes.
In short, such active and experimental liberal models of
educational excellence were designed to make young folks less vulnerable to
being dominated by conservatives. Their main goal was maintaining the same status quo social classes, where
everyone knew their place and stayed in them, even rulers. Just like today, many conservatives then worked only for that result, and as a rule ignored the public good together; for them slavery too was completely
natural. For ancient liberal democratic humanists and pragmatists, however, life could become much better for
everyone, not just the wealthy and powerful. So, liberals celebrated teaching useful and practical kinds of character skills and habits like equality, as well as knowledge and ideas; the results of such knowledge could be tested with the senses for their worthiness and reliability to make life better
for everyone! The conservative assumption about there being some objects producing eternal and
unchanging Truth might make some people feel good, especially those with
religious habits, but for more liberal folks such ideas could not be experimentally tested, and thus remained merely personal assumptions. One either accepted them or didn’t, depending mostly on the way one was educated and how one's parents behaved.
Democritus built an atomic model of nature helping justify
such ideas. It encouraged people to keep focusing on all the natural events going on around them.
Atoms composed all the objects we see around us, like plants, animals, people, and celestial objects.
They all rest on nature’s ever-changing atomic movements, and so knowledge too was ever-changing.
Thus liberal Greek science resulted in urging people to know how to control natural kinds of movements; such regularities were often thought of as laws of nature; a vague natural force like fate gave them their power. For Democritus, then, discovering such laws with the help of one's senses and reason became the highest kind of
knowledge. The senses may sometimes deceive us, but reason can correct such deceptions.
And around the same time liberal doctors like Hippocrates realized such
learning tools could even help cure diseases, build a more healthful world, and
thus make life more satisfying and rewarding for everyone, not just a small wealthy upper class.
How could Democritus be sure atoms really existed if they
couldn't be seen? No one knows for
sure, but we can certain make educated guesses. No doubt he knew we have more senses
than our eyes; his odor-detecting nose also helped convince him unseen objects
exist, or else they couldn't be smelled.
If so, a rather humorous question can be asked:
does the atomic theory also rest on the existence of farts?
In any case, all our senses were useful in any learning project; the
all-important results of our actions can only be senses and felt.
Thus students should use their senses and feelings to help them build
practical and useful habit-arts with intelligent experimental
trial-and-error. So, even ancient
liberal educational excellence became focused on events here and
now, and working to make them produce more satisfying results for everyone.
Secular humanist Protagoras, on the other hand, wasn't
quite so science-oriented. For him intelligent speaking and reasoning habits were the most important useful skills for educational and character excellence!
They were what people needed most to maintain a democratic
city-state. He thus focused on teaching speaking and debating habits to anyone who could afford his lectures,
and even sometimes those who couldn't.
For wise sophists like him, educational excellence focused on learning
useful skills like legal and political debate; they were the closest thing to an
educational absolute liberal Greek sophists had. To democrats like Democritus and
Protagoras, to ignore their own ethical and political habits was their
version of cardinal sin. How could anyone expect to better control the wealthy and
powerful who always seemed to be wanting more power and control over people, and
passing laws to make it easier?
No doubt, both Democritus and Protagoras celebrated such
liberal democratic skills in the 400s BCE; as a young man Socrates too wanted to
know more about scientific models.
And he too called on his fellow Athenians to keep improving their
psyches, or characters; for him character excellence was the most important
habit-art of all, even though to liberals it was a rather narrow kind of
excellence. Never once do any of
his biographers say he spoke out against slavery. Even so, with his help a
person’s character habits became even more important than scientific knowledge,
like respecting others, just laws, and also defending themselves from invaders.
What's more, while actively learning and practicing such
skills, other excellent habits could also be learned, like experimental learning
doctors like Hippocrates was already practicing in the 400s BCE, as well as
honesty, bravery, useful business skills, knowing what actions could be
dangerous and enjoyable, physical training, and of course music, poetry, and
practical mathematics to name just a few.
Also, for many liberals, character habit-arts like philanthropy helped
the poor and celebrated equal rights; Aristotle too felt philanthropy's
importance. Such useful character habit-arts eventually became part of Dewey's educational model too.
Plato's Conservative Model
Conservatives like Plato simply could not stand by and see
many of their religious ideas go unchallenged. Greek life in general encouraged people
to freely express their thoughts and feelings. Religious feelings were important to
him. No doubt, from an early age he was taught to feel reverence and respect for many religious ideas, and they continued on all through his life. He spent the better part of 50 years trying to answer the liberal
democratic challenge to conservative aristocratic ideas, and justify ideas like
eternal Truth, ethical certainty, and political aristocracy.
With him classical philosophic art itself continues
growing to include its traditional subjects: what are the best models of
nature, knowledge, psychology, ethics, politics, art, and education?
For him political ideas opened the door to all those subjects. As a result, his answers to the question What is excellence in all of them? was based on spirit-Ideas. Only such eternal and unchanging objects were capable of producing absolute Truth, thus enshrining the quest for certainty in conservative Western philosophy. Thus, Western civilization’s 3 different philosophic models answering that question go back to the ancient Greeks.
For conservatives all roads lead to Plato. His, and philosophy's, most famous book, misnamed Republic,
built one of Western civilization’s first conservative models of educational excellence. In it only
a small class of intellectuals were to be educated over many decades to eventually rule their city-state with absolute power, guided by certain and eternal spirit-Ideas. Like conservatives to this day, change in most all its forms, was to be prevented while a religious status quo was to be maintained.
What’s more, in it his state, guardians were to be relieved from both the quest for money and a one-woman relationship. Why so harsh? He realized how difficult learning spirit-Truth was, and so he wanted his
rulers to be as little distracted as possible. Women were to be shared and children
raised communally. Only the lowly artisan business class should soil their hands with money and family; it was
essentially the conservative Spartan model of ruling excellence.
And of course hundreds of years later the Roman Church started out with
some similar ideas. I once wrote to America's most famous conservative, devout Roman Catholic William F. Buckley Jr., asking him what his model of excellent education was, and he said the Republic was basically
it, although he would disagree with communal marriage and child-raising, as well as profit-making for the ruling class.
Obviously, his educational model was created with the help
of conservative philosophic assumptions and definitions about nature
itself. For example, pious and religious-oriented Plato simply assumed there existed eternal and unchanging
spirit-Ideas which somehow participated with our natural world, giving it its
eternally repetitious forms and knowledge, like an aristocratic political model,
and math subjects like arithmetic and geometry. Such knowledge was said to reflect
nature’s highest objects of knowledge, and produced the one and only Truth. For him they were the objects on which all true science must depend for its causes; all natural objects in fact try
imitating or merging with those eternal spirit-Ideas, help regulate nature's
actions, and thus knowing their knowledge should be the best goal of the ruling
guardians. Centuries later conservative Catholic Bishop Augustine of Hippo turned Plato's highest Idea, the
Form of the Good, into the Christian god, and the Christian model of educational
excellence became to know, love, and serve god in this world, and be happy with
him in the next. For Plato all religions are seeking to know nature’s most real and unchanging spirit-objects.
Thus, Plato’s philosophic model helped him build Western
civilization's basic educational model as well. In what way?
Well, such spirit-objects are rational and essentially mathematical in
nature, and so educating his guardian class was reduced, for the most part, to
mere passive and contemplative reasoning about such ideas.
In fact even today such objects are often pictured by many Jews,
Christians, and Muslims as god's eternal ideas or patterns.
They are the models or forms god used to create the universe itself. Such perfect spirit-Ideas were also
naturally arranged in an ascending pyramid-like structure of increasing value
and worth, much like social classes were arranged in life, from the many
worthless slaves and poor people at the bottom to powerful rulers and
philosophers at the top. Such spirit-objects thus explain why those social classes exist in all societies, and
should continue to exist as well! They merely reflect the spirit-realm's own eternal and unchanging
hierarchy. On top of his knowledge pyramid stood the Idea of the Good, sometimes equated with the number 1. In short, contrary to Democritus's model of nature as merely atomic objects, Plato's universe was alive and formed a continuous link to human life, passing through a correctly reasoning mind.
Thus everything has its own eternal natural status quo worth and purpose, even guardians.
Under the god-like Idea of the Good were a number of lesser spirit-Ideas
helping control movements in our natural world; the natural world simply
reflected that spirit-structure. So for Plato, at the top of secular society should be a small priest-like
philosophic guardian class who knew nature's eternal Truth and worked to keep it
in place. After years of study in a carefully arranged system, they became capable of grasping nature's eternal and unchanging spirit-Truth. One such idea was society was composed of 3 eternal classes; under the guardians were soldiers, and under them were artisans, businesspeople, poor folks, and slaves
working to support their rulers. Thus an ancient feudalistic and aristocratic social status quo became
enshrined in Plato’s work, eventually becoming the philosophic foundation for
the feudal Christian model of life and nature. Much of it continues on in our modern
world too, in undemocratic institutions run from the top down by a small group
of unelected people, like in the military, corporations, and even our own
Supreme Court. It's prompted many to frustratingly say, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
At the bottom of nature's pyramid were natural objects and
animals created and born with a little piece of those spirit-Ideas, and above
them were people having a larger reasoning faculty embedded with such knowledge
in their psyches at birth; even the stars had a better knowledge of nature's
highest Idea than people; their movements were eternally regular.
Thus even for the gifted few, reasoning and contemplation became
the only way to really learn nature's Truth, just as conservative
educators today say reasoning with book-based facts is educational
excellence. Mathematics is still an important subject to study just for itself, even though it's mostly separated
from any practical use. Such knowledge is said to strengthen one's reasoning faculty and thus helps children
feel nature’s eternal Truth. The idea remains a part of conservative public education to this day, rather than
learning to use math facts to keep building a more democratic world, both in and outside of school.
Slavery had already been practiced for thousands of years
in Iraq and Egypt, so they too must reflect some kind of eternal
spirit-cause. They are what always destine some people to be slaves, some to be soldiers, and a few men and women to see nature’s Truth and thus become philosophic rulers or guardians. So, as in ancient China as well, most everyone's education ended early in life and they went to their predestined
family work, while only the few aristocratic children continue studying with private tutors.
Thus, Plato’s middle-period conservative educational model in
the Republic answered 3 main challenges: what to teach, how to teach them, and
who should be taught? For him, eternal and unchanging Spirit-Ideas were the most important, and difficult,
objects to know, the basic learning method was a mental contemplation technique,
and so only intellectuals should be educated to rule with a decades long process
of abstract study mixed with some practical experience. Why bother?
Well, such knowledge could then be used to make politics, ethics, and
education absolutely True sciences. They would thus bring people closer to their eternal natures, from slaves
to rulers, rather than allowing them to merely keep satisfying their narrow and
selfish pleasures, and especially keep them from using their democratic power to
govern themselves and even those more educated. Both he and Socrates asked:
How can the masses be allowed to make political decisions when they don’t
first know what the eternal and unchanging political Truth is?
So his Republicpainted such an educational model. It aimed at
answering one general ethical question what is justice, and ended up
being Western civilization's best conservative model of educational excellence.
He called his learning method dialectic reasoning. In fact, examples of it are preserved in his early Socratic dialogues. In them Socrates was pictured as asking supposedly intelligent people for
definitions of different universal ideas, like justice, goodness, friendship and
courage, and then testing their answers by looking at their results.
With that kind of learning method Plato felt future philosophic rulers
would eventually grasp nature’s highest spirit-Idea of the Good.
Obviously, in such a elite theocratic system democracy had
no place; it was seen as something to be avoided almost always; even atheists
and agnostics like Protagoras were to be converted or killed.
Today many conservatives like Admiral Hyman Rickover might call such
eternal and unchanging objects scientific facts, and so they too have remained
the basis of conservative book-centered educational excellence at our military
academies. Thus from Plato to today, conservative education is still tied to
obeying one's teachers while absorbing more and more already-existing
book-facts, and of course obeying orders from one's military leaders.
On the plus side, however, he did allow his philosophic
rulers to learn some practical habit-arts; even then such knowledge was
useful. He recommended they have some 15 years of practical experience in the real world, from 35 to 50, living in the natural world and seeing how it works. Ever since, Western educators have
often emphasized, to differing degrees, those 2 kinds of educational goals --
intellectual knowledge and practical character training! Both are needed to deepen and ripen their wisdom and character. Most probably Plato got this idea from a few different sources. One was military Sparta's educational model; in it books weren’t as good as practice itself; and of course Greek life itself was oriented to practical knowledge. So, in Sparta young folks were trained from childhood to be military soldiers and the bearers of strong children.
Another source for his practical training idea may have
come from one of Socrates' biographers, Xenophon.
He was a general who actually took troops to the Persian Empire and saw
how they educated children to produce 2 results: to teach them useful facts, but also to
build their feudalistic character habits.
So, Plato's educational model in the Republic
celebrated bright students learning about Socratic kinds of eternal Truth
as well as politically useful character habits.
They would be the status quo habits worth preserving.
All through the Middle Ages young priests and nuns were told what
religious ideas to believe, but they also learned practical skills like how to
run the monasteries and nunneries they lived in, and how to care for the old and sick as best they could.
In such ways even today’s conservative
schools are more conservative than Plato suggested.
Today mainly book-facts are still memorized, while practical formal
character training is all but ignored, like scientific gardening and helping the
poor! As a result, young public
school students today are entering their adult years even less prepared for
living in a capitalistic aristocracy than Plato's future philosophic
rulers. Is that bad? Well, the results are often increased amounts of crime, public funded
prisons, courts, and police, as well as violent and destructive gang activities,
not to mention increasing health problems, like obesity and all its excessive
results paid to correct by taxpayers!
Finally, in a later work, Laws, he listed his last thoughts about education, mainly in its 10th book. He mentions how important early childhood education is; it’s most important young children feel no pain, sorrow,
or terror. At 3 children should be allowed to socialize, play games, and sing together.
At 6 however, the sexes should be separated but given the same kinds of
education. At 10 children should be taught to read and write, so they could at least know the laws they were
expected to obey. Also they should begin learning more about Greek literature and music, but only those pieces
highly censored and aimed at producing good citizens. And during the teen years
they should start learning arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. It would promote feelings of how powerful and intelligent the gods were to keep such a magnificent system going year after year. It’s a nice example of how really practical the man was. His world was still dominated by war and the military, and so boys especially must be raised to be fearless, brave, and obedient. Without such soldiers Greece could again be easily conquered.
Aristotle's Moderate Model
Aristotle's educational model was, in some ways, a moderate compromise between liberal democrats like Democritus and Protagoras, and conservative Plato. However,
it was much closer to his aristocratic teacher Plato than to Democritus. Students were to be educated and taught
useful aristocratic character habits all at public expense and all in the same
way. But he wasn't able to rise above the confines of his own aristocratic habits of social divisions, and so he
wanted only a small group of male citizens to be educated; women remained
uneducated second class citizens. No doubt that is Aristotle's greatest educational weakness; it no longer
works in a much more democratic world.
In the last 2 chapters of his Politics he goes into some detail about how such children are to be educated, even in
infancy. He thinks they should be fed lots of milk to help them grow, and also as they grow be made to exercise
for coordination, how to move gracefully, play educational games, listen and
play certain kinds of music, and especially be kept from seeing how slaves act. If nothing else the Greeks were natural Behaviorists. They too saw how mere practice creates ideas, feelings, and similar habits.
Seeing how slaves are treated and act would weaken children's own
character training as aristocrats and men of leisure born to govern their
city-states. Today he would definitely be described as very right-of-center in
an educational spectrum, and almost unelectable in the US.
For him too slavery was natural and normal and women were not to be educated. Thus, in Athens only
about 20,000 men should go to school out of around 100,000 people.
And of course higher education at his Lyceum or Plato’s Academy was
reserved for the wealthiest or most talented. And again, for non-citizens, they were
to learn practical work-skills from their parents while even talented slaves were trained by their masters.
Within that narrow educational model, however, he
celebrated some respectable liberal ideas, the most important of which was
character training, helped with music and of course the right
kinds of actions. Both he and Plato felt the importance of such habits.
Young males were to be actively taught to feel pride in their Greek
traditions of excellence. With them the practical habits of a typical Greek aristocrat were to begin growing,
encouraged with enjoyable games and listening and playing music -- some of the
traditional Greek educational activities. He spends many pages talking about playing and listening to the right
kinds of music and its useful results for young aristocratic boys.
In fact, such activities are still a part of early education in most of
our public schools today, at least in the few districts still rich enough to pay
for them. But again, the bad news is his model was restricted to a very small class of male children!
What about his educational thinking for teenagers? Alas, it hasn't been preserved; either
he didn't finish it or it's been lost. As a result we really don’t know what specific subjects he thought best
to teach teenagers, but some scholars have offered educated guesses, as we’ll see a little later.
Even though his model aimed at educating a small group of
male citizens, he also felt the importance of one other liberal character idea
-- individual growth and independence! Learning such excellent skills
involved one's brains, wits, intuition, and the will to win, but again, they had
been an important part of aristocratic education since Homer's day in the 700s
BCE; Aristotle merely agreed with them. Such habits educated students to become people who could better control their own lives, while the rest were to meekly support the social status quo, as
Plato too wanted. In any case, learning such ideals of educational excellence were seen as a continuing process
all through life, and so such training was to begin in childhood. As a result, soon after Aristotle, such feelings for individual self-sufficiency and independence quickly found their way into Stoic and Epicurean models of ethical excellence as the Romans began building some public schools for some of their
citizens. And, of course, eventually, after 1600, those educational ideals began blossoming, helping
nurture more democratic feelings and habits. After all, how can anything new be
built without such habits of independence, individual growth, and intelligent
thinking, whether it's a new invention of a more excellent democratic political habit?
As for higher education at Aristotle's Lyceum, no doubt
only the wealthiest and most talented could continue their studies after
military training from 18-20. There he became famous for walking with his students and lecturing to
them at the same time, thus earning the nickname peripatetic; my first
philosophy professor constantly walked back and forth in front of the class as
he lectured; he was a follower of Ayn Rand who greatly admired Aristotle.
What were his lectures about? Naturally he felt his own philosophic ideas were at least important steps
on the road to Truth, if not the Truth itself. And so he taught them, as well as
philosophy's history, already over 2 centuries old. He probably told them about previous thinking weaknesses, and how his ideas improved on them. And no doubt students helped with his on-going biological and political research. To help him write the Politics, for example, students probably collected information from over 100
city-states, many of which were democratic. That was another important baby-step of
an improvement; he was much more tied to nature and its great diversity than Plato was.
What were some of his 'better' ideas? Well, like Plato, he too wanted to show secular Sophists they were wrong,
and that some kinds of unchanging objects existed and could be known with
contemplative reasoning. For him too nature is a living organism, even stars and planets!
It has an eternal and unchanging pyramid-like structure, capped off with
his god-like idea of a Prime Mover contemplating its own ideas for all
eternity. Thus most everything in nature was a combination of matter and eternal Forms; god for him was Pure Form but he never defined it. Democritus had a similar idea, but his god was made of atoms.
For Aristotle what caused nature’s eternal sameness were individual and
eternal Forms, but for him they were natural objects, not spirit-objects. For him Plato's dualistic spirit-matter
model of nature created too many unsolvable problems, the main one being how can
physical creatures like us can possibly know anything about spirit-objects;
they're completely non-physical? To him that was Plato's greatest weakness.
It's natural to assume he would have taught such ideas to his young students as they walked about the grounds.
Such knowledge really had no practical value, but it helped keep young
men from sinking into what Aristotle felt was the Sophist philosophic pit of
'might makes right' and there really is no ethical and political truth to
discover; for them power was what made the world go round.
To him such ideas were simply too radical, so he experimented with saying
there must exist some eternal and unchanging objects, whose knowledge would be
absolutely certain and eternally True. He assumed, for example, all plant and animal species have eternal Forms
in them and so knowledge about them could be certain!
Thus, higher philosophic education became basically a pastime for aristocratic men who had little else to do in life besides direct slaves to run their farms and talk with fellow citizens about city-state
politics. Science too became merely learning to pigeonhole animals and plants in their eternal species. Dogs exist because they have an eternal dog-Form in them.
Educational Psychology
Quite naturally, then, human psychology itself became very
important for liberals, moderates, and conservatives.
Democritus no doubt started the ball rolling in the 400s BCE.
How could an atomistic human mind possibly learn about atoms themselves,
or anything else for that matter? Basically he said small and smooth mind-atoms exist all through the body,
and so atoms out there react with them inside people, helping them learn about
them, and anything else we know. Conservatives like Plato, and moderates like Aristotle, rejected such a
model, and thus needed to build a very different psychology simply because they
wanted to show how people are capable of knowing eternal and unchanging objects
really exist, and thus can know absolute certainty. As a result, a faculty model of psychology was built and
became the standard one until the early 1900s!
Any model of educational excellence thus depended on human
psychology. At the beginning of his educational model in the Politicshe offered his
feelings about how important it was for legislators to get it right, as his
opening quote tells us. Writing like he just stepped out of Big Brother's conditioning lab, he says:
"The citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives" Thus, with his
psychology both Nazis and Communists would be justified in training racists and anti-capitalists who meekly accept their political elite! Such results to liberal democrats are obviously quite unacceptable; they
merely make it easier for leaders to keep endangering the lives of anyone holding different views and practicing different habits. To many Deweyan liberals today that general education model is more than
a little scary; it's downright anti-democratic, and thus against the public good. To us all citizens should be trained to practice intelligence and tolerance in a open democracy, where equal rights and opportunities are the same for everyone, and all law-abiding people are treated with respect.
About the faculty model, however, like Plato, Aristotle
too said all people have more or less separate mental
faculties;and like Plato too he even hinted one of them might be
non-material in nature, in order to know about unchanging Forms and how they
work. Philosophers have argued about that idea meant from that day to this, but chances are he purposely left
the idea of a non-material mental faculty vague; he himself simply wasn’t sure
whether it exists or doesn't. At any rate, he continued using a faculty model of psychological to build his
educational model. Moreover, each faculty, like reasoning or memory, was strengthened with the help of separate subjects. For example, history improved the memory faculty and logic improved the reasoning faculty. A strong reasoning faculty allowed philosophers like Plato and himself to contemplate
nature and mentally grasp or intuit what it's unchanging objects were really like.
Such a faculty model helped justify his educational model
and give it an air of scientific truth. With a faculty model students felt capable of learning anything if they
studied the right subjects and ideas. And it also helped justify his ideas about human development as
well. For example, there are, he said, 3 general stages of development.
In early childhood the dominant faculty was growth and movement; in later
childhood a more irrational psychic faculty became active; and finally in
adolescence a rational faculty began growing. Students became capable of following
logical arguments, and of thus grasping nature's Truth.
Thus teachers should plan their educational training according to how old
the student was, and not waste both student and teacher energies teaching what
children are not really ready to learn.
So, to about 7 or 8, children should focus on strengthening their bodies and coordination with intelligent kinds of exercise; the goal was to build useful character habits of grace and
coordination; light exercise and games should be the dominant skills learned. Their reasoning faculty simply was too immature to give abstract ideas like geometry much depth and meaning.
Then, to about 12 or 13, students should be given formal character training, to weaken their irrational faculty. Practice in building useful objects, telling the truth, and respecting just laws should be taught.
Besides making their lives easier, it would also help their city-state
work more peacefully and efficiently. And as Plato too recommended, children should be made to feel pain about acting passionately and irrationally, while feeling some pleasure about acting
rationally, gracefully, and honestly; Aristotle basically agreed.
Again, for such character training music was a very important teaching tool, both playing and listening to certain kinds of it. The wrong kinds of music would produce more counterproductive and irrational feelings and emotions, thus making academic studies later on that much more difficult.
Needless to say athletics continued on at this 2nd stage of growth.
Then finally, around 13, the intellectual faculty can start being trained, leading eventually to an individual
psyche capable of independently seeing the best ethical and political choices to
make, while a few philosophic types could begin contemplating the true nature of
an entirely self-absorbed, eternally meditating god. That idea alone stood atop both his educational and ethical models, just as a contemplating god stood stop his model of nature.
Contemplating it alone could produce the highest form of human
happiness. Plato, however, was much more cautious; for him philosophy should be put off until certain
conservative habits were stronger, like after 30. Before that young folks were more likely to become skeptical about conservative ideas.
Again, for Aristotle's right-of-center educational model,
women simply didn't have the same kinds of faculties as men; he was certainly no
women’s libber; only male citizens should be well educated.
And, as for what subjects should be taught in the teen years to help
strengthen their reasoning faculty, he doesn't say.
But as authors Boyd and King point out, it almost certainly wouldn't have
focused on math studies, as Plato recommended. Thanks to his careful reading of
Democritus, Aristotle was much more focused on this world and learning more
about its plants and animals than Plato ever was, and so biology and
history would probably have replaced mathematics as the main subjects
for young Greek men.
Why those subjects? Well, history can easily be used to keep teaching excellent Greek
character habits, like those in Homer's Odyssey. In it Odysseus is challenged again and again to think quickly about getting out of dangerous situations. And it can also be educational.
For example, it's one thing to read how Pericles built an economic
blockade around one rebelling city-state, in order to keep them in the Athenian
empire, rather than giving them their independence. But history can also be used to teach the habit-art of independent thinking as well! All the teacher need ask students is what they would have done in such
situations, and what the results of their choices would have been. Answering those
kinds of questions are what independent and intelligent thinking is all
about! Using history like that, so students can start focusing on seeing the probable results of their
decisions, thus helps build both student character and reasoning
excellence, rather than merely making them memorize more and more historical facts.
And, no doubt poetry would have been high on his recommended subject list. After all, he believed abstract universal Forms existed in individual objects and could be known; even rocks fell to earth because their natural desire was to seek the earth’s center; that was their natural Final Form.
What's more, poets are better at thinking about such universal ideas than
historians; thus students should study the poets and theiruniversal
abstractions! To him they were even more important than historical ideas; they can only teaches
particular facts, but poetic universals aim to know more real objects, those
closer to god’s ideas itself! Such ideas clearly show his fondness for training students to think with
general and abstract ideas, rather than experiment to see what results any idea
actually produces. In that respect he definitely helped the delay modern science itself.
It all goes back to his basic faculty psychology; abstract ideas like Forms were, for him, more real than any individual event, and so education should train young men to keep studying them.
Such feelings can be seen in his biological model too. From his doctor-father he
learned to respect natural events, and so he himself became a keen observer and
collector of them. Studying them helped our abstract thinking about how nature’s
eternal Forms work to build what we see in the natural world. Thus, his biology wasn't evolutionary in the least, as some earlier philosophers were. For him some eternal and unchanging objects are buried within individuals; he called them Forms, and a reasoning faculty was the only way to learn about them.
Every person, for example, had a piece of an eternal human Form within
them, even though he too couldn’t describe exactly how that can happen. Thus, students should merely learn how to classify animals and plants in their eternal and unchanging species. In general, then, his faculty
psychology helped justify such biological studies until Darwin's evolutionary
model opened to door to modern biology.
Educational Weaknesses?
Many high school students today would easily see many weaknesses in such conservative and moderate educational models. No doubt, delaying the growth of our strongest learning art --
experimental learning -- is the worst! Both Plato and Aristotle felt mere contemplative reasoning could grasp and behold nature's eternal objects and their Truth. As a result, experimental learning about how our world works and what's makes it go round was left to hang. Even from moderate Aristotle all species are eternal.
Experimental learning simply couldn't produce the kind of eternal and absolute Truth both Plato and Aristotle wanted, even though both knew doctors like Hippocrates was using it, but to them such knowledge was deeply flawed.
Even while Democritus was writing his many amazing books helping build Western civilization's scientific foundations, Socrates was questioning anyone he could to find absolutely unchanging abstract ideas. And as the Parthenon was being built, experimental medical students were carefully gathering useful knowledge from
their patients, noting symptoms and the results of medicines. For such liberal doctors, then, experimental learning was the best method for gathering more useful knowledge about disease and possible cures. Again, both Plato and Aristotle rejected such knowledge in their quest for absolute certainty.
Secondly, both Plato's and Aristotle's faculty psychology created a rather un-natural
model of how people actually learn anything. Rather than seeing how children start
learning their habits in childhood, by imitating their parents, they said
people already have learning faculties built into them at birth, and so mere
academic book facts are the best way to develop one's intellect!
Thus passive reasoning was the best way to learn about any of nature's
truths. For Plato such truths were spirit-Ideas, while Aristotle’s were eternal natural Forms.
Thus, with a faculty psychology, their educational goal wasn’t to change or improve life or nature, but merely to know it in all its grandeur. Their faculty psychology helped them believe nature didn't need improving. Dewey eventually called their learning models spectator theory of
learning; to him they were simply 2 more models of philosophic art, nothing more
and nothing less, rather than eternal Truth. They helped justify those deeper
feelings and assumptions about nature they began feeling in childhood. What's more, both Plato and Aristotle
felt such ideas, feeling how their philosophic models too were subject to doubt and questioning.
Even so, Aristotle continued building the model he felt was best. For example, because he
based his psychology on mere faculty reasoning, he believed health itself was
the result of balanced of internal fluids; when they become unbalanced disease
and sickness results. As a result, however, his contemplative habit was so strong it left little room for learning
more useful knowledge by practicing the slow trial-and-error experimental
learning model, even for someone as intelligent as he. So, the conclusion seems reasonable: personal habits and feelings formed in childhood confine even the most intelligent people, rather than any kind of
inbuilt psychic faculties.
About learning character habits, however, he was more liberal, thanks no doubt to his careful reading of Democritus. Thus ethical kinds of habits could only be learned by trial and error
practice. So, it should be easy to see yet another educational weakness of his; he created a dualistic system. Elementary education taught young men about aristocratic ethical values and ideas before they went to work in the family business, while higher education for wealthier students focused on more
philosophic ideas. In any case, however, the highest kind of truth could only be learned with contemplative
reasoning; for him and for Plato reasoning about abstract universal ideas
produced the best kind of knowledge and happiness. It was most like god itself! As a result, experimentally testing ideas really couldn't produce such knowledge; only intuitively and mentally seeing and grasping nature's ‘truth’ could. In fact, to Aristotle, only such reasoning with abstract ideas could produce the highest god-like happiness.
Thus the very narrow range of students too is another major weakness in his educational model. These days the more young folks can become better educated about what intelligent character habits feel like, and how to intelligently use their book-facts to keep improving life here and now, the better off all of us are. Otherwise a small minority will continue getting most of what's best in life while everyone else lives on a much lower level of opportunity. Welcome to our present world, as we saw in the last section! As a result, limiting educational opportunities helps create an on-going source of social resentment in people. Why should only those born into wealth and economic power have more opportunities than anyone else? So, the more educated everyone is, and the more they know how to use experimental learning creatively and constructively, the less they'll feel the need for criminal actions. Such results have led many liberals to say Aristotle was a rather cold and heartless Greek aristocrat; he certainly had a weaker democratic feeling for humanity than both Democritus and Protagoras, and perhaps even weaker than many of the US Constitution Framers. Like many of them he honored seemingly eternal social divisions of rich and poor, noble and common, free and slave.
As long as those social divisions remained in place, his
educational model centering on mere reasoning and learning more book-facts could
be justified. In fact, until quite recently such an aristocratic status-quo model was firmly set within Western
civilization's already economically stratified feudalistic societies. Such a system was made even more rigid
when, after him, Romans started ignoring periodic forgiveness of debt; it kept
the lower classes living truly miserable lives as they worked to support the
ruling classes, while fear and punishment, either religious or physical, were
used to keep that social status quo in place. In short, his and Plato's educational
models helped form the mainstream of Western education until the 1800s, while
Democritus's and Protagoras's more liberal democratic models of education and
politics were all but forgotten.
Roman Models
Within Roman society 2 educational improvements began, no doubt on a small scale. One was the idea of a public school system, and the other was educating both girls and boys. As a rule, Romans valued women’s contributions to society much more than the Greeks did.
Around the time Aristotle died in 322 BCE, the Romans began
building elementary schools for those families who could afford it.
Of course, those who couldn't afford to keep educating their children at
home, teaching them the practical skills useful at that time, like farming and
soldiering became standard. Also, character training remained an important habit-art whether a child went to
school or didn't. Such schools were called play schools where young Romans learned just the basics of reading,
writing, and mathematics. Young Romans also were taught how to be good citizens, and what their civic duty was; it was the educational goal even after the Empire began with Augustus, a few
decades before Jesus was born. By that time more liberal Stoic and Epicurean philosophic models were solidly
embedded within Roman society; the Stoic model, especially, celebrated everyone
having some kind of civic duty, and so ethical excellence meant learning to do
one’s work and seeing it as a solemn duty. Philosophic emperor Marcus Aurelius (26
CE -180) was a fine example of that idea. And for the upper classes the Epicurean atomist model of nature focused on pleasure as the highest good; no doubt far too many Romans took that idea to
gaudy excess, both with food and sex, but it certainly didn't inspire many
democratic feelings in people. Only the small upper class had the money to even learn about
philosophy. Most children ended their education at 12 or 13, and then went to work.
Much to Roman credit, however, public education began growing somewhat as a few such schools were built. As the lower class plebeians got more political power, slowly liberal Roman Stoics began seeing all citizens as deserving equal educational rights, and helping build their feelings for doingone's social duty towards others and the state.
In any case, with the growth of Rome's empire, education remained important and focused on practical secular subjects, like public speaking and military arts. Around the empire’s beginning was born important educators like Varro (d. 27 BCE) and Quintilian (100 CE). Varro wrote an early encyclopedia, and Quintilian wrote some 12 books on the art of teaching how to speak forcefully and persuasively. To him wise Romans should begin educating their children as soon as possible; he noticed they had powerful memories, and so he wasn't afraid to expand the rather limited number of subjects studied. To the 3 basic subjects of study, namely intelligent speaking, logical thinking, and
grammar studies, was added geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. For many superstitious people at the time, 7 was a sacred number and so there should be only 7 important subjects for educational excellence; the less superstitious Quintilian added also medical and architectural studies too. They were just as important as any others.
Then, during the so-called 2 century Pax Romana, from Augustus to Aurelius, more Roman secular schools were built and charged parents a fee. In the countries its armies had conquered, including Palestine, reading and writing of Latin and arithmetic was taught to Roman children. And of course for those who could afford it, more subjects were added in the teen years. No doubt one such school was even built at Sepphoris, an important Roman city a few miles from Jesus's Nazareth home, and probably also in the Decapolis towns east of Galilee's sea. There even young secular Hellenized Jews of noble birth, like Herod Agrippa (10 BCE - 44 CE), could learn to speak Latin and perhaps even some Greek; eventually the gospels too were all written in Greek around the time Quintilian was writing his books on public speaking.
France too became another area where Romans wanted to educate
young men in grammar schools; not many native Celts objected.
Unlike Palestine, secular studies were encouraged by their Druid
priests. Thus for about 200 years, Rome helped make Alexandria and its libraries one of 3 major advanced learning and research centers, the other 2 being Rome and Athens; today we call them
universities. To them thousands of upper class young men and women from around the empire flocked to learn more about this world, how to speak Greek and Latin well, and to create the
philosophic model of life and nature they thought most excellent.
In short, from its earliest days Roman education was centered on
teaching practical and useful subjects to students, including character
development --gravitas. And at the end of the Christian Middle Ages such schools would
again begin growing much stronger in Italy by the 1300s, helping create the
Italian Renaissance. In fact, Italy never really sunk as deeply into a Dark Age as did countries north of the
Alps. Thus individual excellence, or virtues, remained one of liberal education's
foundational ideas, celebrated by Dewey too in the 1900s.
Democracy was strengthened by habits of intellectual curiosity and
independent thinking, rather than the usual group-conformity to teachers and nly book-facts.
As a rule, however, in seems one of Rome's great educational
weaknesses was not teaching habits of excellent citizenship to all its
young folks. Thus feelings of duty and service eventually grew weaker and more self-indulgent with
war after war after war. And, the more corrupt and self-indulgent the ruling class became, the more vulnerable the empire itself became to invading barbarian armies.
No doubt, many Celts still wanted revenge for Julius Caesar’s mass
killing in France a few centuries before.
It took several centuries but Rome itself finally fell as Catholic Bishop
Augustine of Hippo was writing his famous City of God; it defended his Roman Church from the charge of Christians ignoring and angering the Roman gods, and thus allowing barbarians to destroy
it. For him all earthly empires pass, but the heavenly city of god doesn't.
Higher Learning
A few more words about ancient secular and naturalistic
university education may be said; their accomplishments were impressive
indeed. Many emperors after Augustus supported Athenian schools as one of Europe's 3 main higher-learning
centers. Stoic Emperor Aurelius, for example, saw how valuable ancient Greek philosophic models of life and
nature were, so he generously supported all 4 main Athenian philosophic schools,
financing 2 scholars for each to teach Platonic, Aristotelian, Atomistic, and Stoic ideas. As a result, almost everything in higher education was in place in 200 CE for modern experimental science to being blossoming as never before, actually learning to harness nature's energies with useful kinds of knowledge, and thus
help make life a little better for everyone. Centuries earlier, for example, the
ancient world’s greatest mathematician Archimedes (287 BCE - 212 BCE) even went
to the brink of creating the very useful study now called the infinitesimal
calculus. Also calculated with some accuracy were the earth and moon’s size and distance, and also the sun’s
distance from the earth!
So, what happened? The monopoly of conservative Church schools would effectively end secular
studies; the calculus would be discovered with Newton and Leibniz in the
1600s. No doubt Archimedes would have done it had he had our much simpler number system first built in India, taken to the Muslim world, and from there brought into Europe after 1,000
CE. With it Muslim scholars built the study of algebra. Sadly, however, the more barbarians invaded the empire after 300 CE, the more such universities were destroyed, and eventually replaced as churches were built with attached schools merely for religious education. One of the first things the Church did
in the 400s CE was close down all non-religious universities, including Plato’s and Aristotle’s.
In was a slow conservative process. Secular studies were still the educational foundation for Christians even
in the late 300s CE, before the great barbarian breakthroughs of the 400s. Before his baptism and his becoming the Church's main conservative propagandist, Augustine himself was a secular-minded
rhetoric teacher living in a loving relationship with his mistress and
illegitimate son. His very devout Christian mother Monica forbad him to marry beneath his class.
At Rome he even wrote about educational philosophy, and mentioned some
secular subjects every young educated Roman should know.
However, the conservative grip on the Church proved too
powerful. Roman schools were thus unable to compete with that monopoly.
At the lower levels of schooling they continued for a while relying
mainly on teaching only elementary book-facts, like Latin language and grammar
arts, but of what use were they when barbarians were tearing down and burning
buildings? Of what use was knowing how to write as elegantly as Cicero and Ovid when torches were flying? Speaking and writing Latin mainly helped the business and political class keep working, but more was happening in the empire than just those kinds of events.
No doubt, such language studies were useful to the literate few; Lucretius's great liberal Epicurean poem On Nature was one result. Centuries later it would introduce Renaissance scholars to Democritus's Atomistic model of life and nature, and thus become the philosophic foundation for modern science, but there were other serious social challenges secular schools simply couldn’t respond to. The Church’s answer to poverty and sickness with ideas of a perfect heavenly life after death proved too strong for most everyone. In truth, like every other human institution, if schools don’t keep changing and improving within an always changing world, then social excellence itself becomes that much more difficult. We're seeing that even today with increased social problems like crime, obesity, economic greed, conservative politics, and drug abuse. So, with today’s increasing rate of social and technological change, where new inventions and job changes are happening almost daily, the educational challenge to keep improving our schools is even greater. If something isn’t done about student university debt, it may take decades for people to pay them off. In any case, the growth of conservative Christianity brought some fundamental educational changes to the very definition of excellence, as we'll see in the next section.
3. EDUCATION HIGHLIGHTS: MEDIEVAL
From the Ancient to the Medieval
Conservative Christianity's educational model was based mainly on Plato's ideas and the conservative Jewish religious model. Within a few centuries after Jesus’s death its basic ideas began forming with the work of Paul of Tarsus, an educated Jewish rabbi and Roman citizen. Eventually it would dominate even more liberal and secular Roman and Greek models. Roman educational excellence celebrated many different gods in monotheistic provinces like Israel; social unrest often became openly violent. There the educational focus was on one god, not many, and base only on Mosaic Law for teaching character habits.
Centuries before Jesus, after the Jewish Babylonian captivity in the late 500s BCE, new spirit-ideas began growing with the help of new religious writings. With them came the ideas of a redeeming messiah or anointed one, an immortal soul, and ideas of an afterlife. By Jesus’s day synagogue schools began evolving as well, and teaching such ideas. The newer religious writings taught young Jewish boys the new messianic ideas of a soon-to-happen Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
Conservative Sadducees in Jerusalem, however, would have none of it. They remained faithful only to the Mosaic writings, which said nothing about an immortal soul or Kingdom of Heaven. No doubt, the new ideas expressed some very deep social anxieties about life in general, namely, that it’s quite unbearable and only a radical god-caused heavenly kingdom on earth could make it better. In Jesus’s day such end times were felt to be very near, as the Gospels tell us.
In any case, however, educating first born males, like Jesus, about Jewish ideas remained very important, and even easier to teach in northern Israel where less orthodox habits were practiced. The general religious rule about character was to 'give' first born males to god, so to speak, and teach them religious habit-arts; he, in turn, would then teach younger brothers and sisters about Jewish religious law and traditions. The New Testament itself tells us Jesus had 4 brothers and at least 2 sisters. Eventually he accepted a messianic mission and began telling Jews to repent, thus hoping to speed Yahweh’s help in sending his new kingdom sooner, rather than later. Again, the Gospels tell us his mission was only to Israelis; to orthodox Jesus non-Jews were unclean and to be avoided. And for his mission he recruited a small group of mostly illiterate Jewish men, teaching them more about his messianic mission, the new religious ideas, like life after death, the soon-to-arrive Kingdom of Heaven, and how Jews would rule and judge over the world’s nations.
So, in much of Palestine secular Roman education was simply unacceptable, especially to faithful Jews like Jesus; he was a practicing Jew all his life. To such Jews Rome was the devil itself, and a polluter of Jewish law and life. Eventually, however, as the expected kingdom of heaven did not happen, open revolt against Rome broke out in 66 CE and again in 70. After all, popular literature at the time educated people, including Jesus, to believe the messiah was to come from the warrior House of David. As the gospels tell us, not being of that house he was thus almost forced to argue against that widely accepted idea.
During his lifetime there were many different Jewish sects growing in Israel, each having their own educational model of excellence. The Zealot movement, for example, taught active revolutionary habit-arts. They educated young Jewish men to return oppressive Roman force with force; its Sicarii members carried knives for assassination purposes, and it was one of only 2 Jewish sects not spoken of badly in the New Testament, the other being the peaceful, reclusive, and pious Essenes, of whom John the Baptist was certainly one. Why weren’t they criticized? Well, they were both seen as teaching educational excellence, whereas moderate Pharisees, Scribes, and Sadducees were more tolerant of Roman rule.
Thus, after Jesus’s death for spreading sedition against Rome by claiming to be a king-messiah, a new Nazarene movement began growing in a still hopeful Jewish world of widespread disease, poverty, and suffering. Then, for years after his conversion to the small Nazarene movement , Paul of Tarsus slowly worked out the basic Christian educational theology: Jesus was the hoped-for messiah, and believing in his resurrection was all anyone needed to enjoy an eternally blissful life after death, basking in a spirit-world! He too believed the hoped-for Kingdom of Heaven was about to start unfolding any day. Being a Roman citizen and very well educated, he certainly knew about Plato’s dualistic model of nature, and his educational epistles celebrated such ideas. But again, when the expected return of Jesus didn't happened, the so-called Second Coming, and after the Romans just about wiped out Palestine's Jewish population in 70 CE, Christian leaders began defining their ideas to followers of the movement with many different gospels. Within their writings heaven was pictured not as an earthly kingdom, but as existing only in a spirit-realm, the kind Plato had written about some 400 years earlier. Soon many different gospels were written, helping teach people who Jesus was, why he was killed, and how miracles can happen to those pleasing god. Eventually 4 gospels became accepted. Thus conservative Plato's dualistic philosophic model of an immortal soul and a spiritual life after death for believers became embedded at the core of a growing Christian educational model.
In time the empire itself continued falling apart, and so the way opened for a Christian educational model to keep growing. After all, it was hopeful, and most everyone was poor, uneducated, hungry, many had diseases, and for everyone life was short. Thus, hope for a better life after death merely for believing Jesus was the messiah and had risen from the dead became more and more emotionally attractive and educationally possible. The old Platonic dualistic ideas were useful: nature is really a dualism of matter and spirit, and so eternal and unchanging spirit-objects like god and the immortal soul really exist; Christianity thus began getting a conservative philosophic respectability. Their ideas were very comforting for almost all uneducated, poor, and suffering people living truly short miserable lives. After all, then, as now, many rich folks continued ignoring the poor and kept working merely to increase their own fortunes. What should they care about the suffering masses, and many built vast estates outside of Rome. Eventually Augustine (d. 430), in his City of God, welded that dualistic Platonic model onto a Christian model of redemption and salvation, creating a new medieval educational model: nature is divided into an evil and corrupt material world full of devils, and a pure and perfect godly heaven; and only after accepting Jesus as their savior could anyone eventually enter a perfect and pain-free spiritual world after death. To the vast majority in the lower classes such ideas were very comforting.
Naturally, with such ideas, it slowly became more difficult for Roman secular schools to stay open; what need was there to teach Roman boys how to speak elegantly when the Christian movement was growing and barbarian spears and torches were everywhere? And, obviously, the more that happened, the more difficult it became to preserve secular skills and scientific research itself, still going on in the 3 great ancient universities at Athens, Rome, and especially Alexandria.
A little over a century after the Pax Romana ended around 180 CE, the conservative other-worldly Christian educational model was growing stronger within the empire. Then, shortly after 300 CE, after praying to the Christian god and asking for a victory in battle, Emperor Constantine became a Christian himself. For a while he ended Christian persecution and thus openly encouraged the religion’s growth. Naturally, the more its ideas spread, the more poor, destitute, and disabled throughout the empire joined the movement, as well as all those educated people who wanted an eternally perfect and blissful life too. Merely believing Jesus was god, died for their sins, and rose from the dead became core Christian educational beliefs.
Slowly, then, Roman secular schools were replaced with the conservative Christian model of monastery and church schools, teaching only those ideas and ritual habits. For them life’s absolute Truth had finally been revealed. Even though god had created the world, it was seen more and more as merely a testing ground for the faithful; one’s natural thoughts about sex, for example, really came from evil devils. The natural world thus became something to retreat from and shut out, with all its devil-causing sinful temptations, diseases, and pains. They were now taught not as natural events and things to study, but rather as sent by god as a punishment for sin, even though god was supposedly all-good, all-merciful, and all-powerful. The more people were taught to practice religious habits, the less they bothered asking how devils could even possibly be created by such a god. How can anything imperfect and evil possibly come from something perfectly good, loving, and merciful? In such an educational system based on habits rather than logic and experimental learning, it would take many centuries before such questions would be asked again.
What's more, because such ideas were said to be absolute Truth, they shouldn’t even be questioned. Thus all educational competition, especially from non-religious secular schools, should not be tolerated! Orthodox Christians like Augustine wanted a complete and total educational monopoly, even over different Christian sects. Thus the secular universities throughout the empire quickly became targets for zealous Christians, eventually closing them in the early 500s. For example, even in the 200s CE Christian intolerance was practiced; an Alexandrian mob caught a neo-Platonic mathematician named Hypatia and literally scrapped the flesh from her bones! Roman religious tolerance was rapidly becoming a thing of the past! After all, Plato too was intolerant of atheists and agnostics, and so it was easy for even Augustine in the 400s to help violently crust a heretic Christian sect in North Africa! The quest for a Catholic monopoly caused warfare to become more powerful in Western civilization, setting a precedent for the brutal Inquisition itself beginning in the 1200s.
Also, around Hypatia’s time, the world-class libraries at Alexandria were burned. Scholars thus lost the desire to keep working in their primary home. Slowly, what books they still had were sent east into Syria and eventually to Bagdad; there secular learning and research was much more alive and growing. Even liberal Greek atomist ideas were treated with much more respect by many Arab scholars, even in the 800s. And much to their credit, much of Aristotle's lecture notes were saved as well, even after Islam became the religious model of excellence. His much friendlier feelings about nature and natural science would eventually find their way back into Europe via Muslim Spain in the 1100s, thus helping young university students like Thomas Aquinas build a much different educational model of life and nature.
A Religious Curtain Descends Around Europe
Meanwhile, as the ancient world was closing in the 400s, conservative Christians continued building their educational monopoly. They taught youngsters Christianity was the absolute Truth, and any other ideas were not to be tolerated; for many centuries only one major philosopher was active and challenged orthodox ideas, one Irishman named John Erigena (d. 877). He eventually built a Christian pantheistic model of nature, later re-painted without Christian ideas by Baruch Spinoza (d. 1674): nature is god and god is nature. Such deistic ideas were quite similar to what Democritus had painted in the ancient world, and would become quite acceptable to man US Founders like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. For most everyone else, however, Christian feelings about absolute Truth were so much a part of education, and taught to so many, even today conservative Christians and Muslims feel only their models of life and nature are True, and everyone else’s is less than excellent. Only recently have more people begun seeing a more liberal model of truth: all religious truths merely reflect merely different kinds of habits -- habits formed with actions and practices.
Again, the conservative Christian educational model was thus vastly different from both Greek and Roman secular schools. For subject matter Christians substituted the Bible, and for its learning method ritual practice replaced reading and logic. Actually for conservative Catholic Christians reading the Bible became much less than desirable, no doubt because of its many contradictory ideas. Such knowledge could only help form difficult questions. For example, who was the real Jesus? Even the gospels themselves differed greatly and painted contradictory portraits. Teaching Christian ideas with ritual habits avoided all such problems.
Slowly, monasteries and nunneries evolved, along with physical punishment for sin and hours of daily praying and hymn singing for young priests and nuns. No doubt such nunneries liberated many women from their kitchen work, but not from obedience to religious ideas and habits. As teachers do today in conservative schools, abbots and mother superiors had all the authority, and the Bible became the only book allowed. Even as a child Augustine was often whacked by his Roman teachers whenever he didn’t stay focused on what was being taught; god forbid anyone should have any kind of independent thought or question. And of course later on, as philosophic logic was growing stronger after 1000, even brutally killing dissenters with public burnings and hangings were used to 'educate' people about Christian ‘Truth', and against the new ideas of experimental science and a sun-centered astronomical model. Even in the 1500s its modern creator Copernicus (d. 1543) was afraid to publish his Christian-shattering sun-centered ideas. After all, Aristotle said the earth was the center of the universe, the absolutely certain Bible endorsed the idea, and Thomas Aquinas accepted it; end of discussion. Anyone who disagreed endangered their own life.
The Medieval World Dawns
Such a conservative educational system evolved slowly. Even many Christian conservatives like Tertullian (d. 225 CE) and later Jerome (d. 420 CE) still made a place for secular Roman learning. Radical Tertullian ( I believe in Christian ideas because they’re absurd!) still saw secular Roman schools as basically the best option for educating Christian boys, so they could at least learn to read the Bible and other religious writings, then written in Greek. And even centuries later, in his desert cave, hermit Jerome still felt guilty about reading pagan Cicero, whose head and hands were cut off and publicly displayed as a lesson to all Roman republicans!
In Roman schools of the 200s CE, the so-called 7 liberal arts were actively taught with secular subjects like geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy. Slowly, however, all that began changing as Christians continued building their educational monopoly. Everything focused on teaching obedience to ritually religious habits and ideas. After all, slaves, obey your masters, had been a status quo idea of Paul’s from the beginning. And to help build its monopoly three very radically conservative Christians focused their energies.
Augustine (d. 430 CE) was the first. As the Empire was literally collapsing around him, Augustine worked to justify Christian ideas in his City of God. In his zeal to anchor everyone's feelings only to his Bible's 'Truth', he said secular studies like rhetoric and logic should be illustrated only with Biblical ideas. To him Christian ideas were the be-all and end-all of life and learning – the incarnation of absolute and eternal Truth. They were all anyone would ever need to receive god's grace for a heavenly reward, even though the very idea of free will became questionable when he also said god already knew who would be saved and who wouldn’t! Almost no one could read Latin or Greek, and so such logical problems were rarely felt or questioned. Augustine, like Tertullian before him, saw a crucial educational truth: habits are much stronger than logic itself, and so the educational emphasis should be on practice, not reading and asking logical questions.
Such an educational model thus made critical kinds of question-asking almost impossible. Only to those who didn’t practice Christian habits did it seem logical to ask: if mere belief in the resurrection was needed for salvation, then why practice any church rituals? If we are saved only by grace, then why be baptized or confess any sins? In fact, questions liked that eventually asked by Martin Luther (d. 1546) finally broke the Catholic educational monopoly and helped launch the Protestant Reformation itself in the early 1500s. According to Christianity's founder Paul of Tarsus, people are saved by faith alone, showing yet again how the force of Catholic habits triumphed for centuries over logic itself. Martin Luther eventually overcame such habits while actually reading the Bible. Even so, for centuries building powerful and propulsive ritual habits in their monasteries and schools trained young Catholics to keep ignoring almost the entire natural world and all its liberating energies and knowledge. For people like Augustine they should be replaced with Christian rituals and other-worldly myths. Such a religious, spirit-based educational monopoly had been at the heart of Plato's political thinking as well; even Aristotle felt such habits help keep people obedient, passive, and accepting. Rebellious feelings were thus reduced to a minimum.
Two other very conservative Christians also helped destroy the secular Roman education model for at least 4 centuries. Within about a century after Augustine's death, 2 Christian leaders also helped justify their Bible-based educational monopoly. As Emperor Justinian was closing all the empire's non-Christian schools and universities in 529, and even forbidding teaching philosophy in Athens, Benedict (d. 543) and Pope Gregory 1 (d. 604) helped close the remaining secular schools. As Plato had done centuries earlier, they too turned away from teaching young folks how to keep experimentally knowing about this world's natural movements and causes, learning how to harness its natural energies with better tools, and continue liberating people from horrible diseases, poverty, ignorance, drudgery, slavery, and hopelessness. For them too an all-loving and powerful god had unknowable reasons for creating and maintaining the miserable world most everyone lived in; that mere philosophic assumption struck at the heart of liberal education and scientific research itself. What need for Church rituals would any educated person have?
Thus, educational and character excellence for true Christians meant withdrawing from studying nature and life in this world, as Buddhism’s Siddhartha Gotoma had preached in his Fire Sermon centuries earlier. Jesus too redd religious books and probably nothing else. People were thus to be taught to withdraw from life and learning, much like the ancient Essenes had done in Jesus’s day; life should be lived to please a god, and for the lower classes to keep working to support the ruling classes. Like Augustine before him, Benedict's rules for monastic life continued reducing the objects of learning to Christian miracle-stories, worship habits, and of course teaching them to children and converts, helping ensure their acceptance and continuing practice. They too knew such habits are propulsive.
Bishop of Rome Gregory 1, called by Christians the Great, agreed with that educational model, and his writings thus encouraged people to believe in spirit-caused miracles. He too pictured such ideas as the only eternal and unchanging absolute Truth people should learn. With such feelings he eagerly wrote about many miracle stories involving Benedict himself:
"A certain woman there was which some time he had seen, the memory of which the wicked (devil) spirit put into his mind, and by the memory of her did so mightily inflame ... the soul of God's servant ... But suddenly, assisted with God's grace, he came to himself, and seeing many thick briers and nettle bushes to grow hard by, off he cast his apparel, threw himself into the midst of them, and there wallowed so long that, when he rose up, all his flesh was pitifully torn; and so by the wounds of his body he cured the wounds of his soul. ...
(As an abbot Benedict) insisted upon observance of strict virtue (a Latin word for excellence), so that the monks, in a rage, decided to poison him with a glass of … wine. He, however, made the sign of the cross over the glass, whereupon it broke in pieces. So he returned to the wilderness.
(And in a letter to another bishop about teaching grammar he writes) ... It came to our ears, what we cannot mention without shame, that (you are) in the habit of expounding grammar to certain persons. ... the praises of Christ cannot find room in one’s mouth with the praises of Jupiter. (Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, 379, 385)
Apparently such evil secular subjects, like learning to speak properly to followers and think logically, were much less important than actually accepting Christian ideas and practicing its rituals. Tor people like Tertullian such accepting simply resolved all logical problems, as they did for Augustine too. Faith eliminates the need and desire to think critically. No doubt, Benedict and Gregory too sensed the strength of a Christian willpower formed with habits and practices, rather than logic and debate, even in the 500s CE.
As a result, soon nuns and priests were being educated to spend about 9 hours every day and night praying and chanting psalms, thanks to Benedict's religious rules and Gregory's love of music. Gregorian chants can be heard even today and still appeal to many; pre-adolescent boys were often said to sound like angels themselves. Thus many of the arts too became Christian educational tools, including music, painting, and statue-making. Religious pictures would dominate Western civilization until well into the modern period, starting in the 1600s. Even Plato and Aristotle had wanted music used as educational tools. And when priests, monks, and nuns weren't praying and chanting, many would practice their artful religious writing skills by routinely copying books; they thus at least kept art and writing skills alive, as the famous ornate Book of Kells shows. Also, as we’ll see a little later, their collecting old Roman and Greek manuscripts for their libraries would one day keep opening the Renaissance door in Italy in the 1400s.
Before that, however, one great educational weakness was ignored in the conservative Christian model: human nature simply isn't built to keep ignoring and withdrawing from the natural world! That may be said to be Christianity's original sin against humanity! Not only is there simply much more to learn than just obeying Christian rituals and accepting their ideas, but natural evolution itself had selected people who were naturally curious about life! Such creatures thus learned more survival skills, like how to build tools to make food more available and thus improve life. In short, conservatism itself is to an extent unnatural: it tries to stop change and improvement in a nature continually changing and thus creating the need for more improvements! As a result, it was just a question of time before its educational monopoly began weakening, and finally ignored altogether by progressive liberals in the late 1600s! Belgium schools began ignoring religious ideas altogether.
Gregory himself is a good example of how impossible it is to stamp out all secular studies and arts, like logic and reading, and above all, keep ignoring human curiosity and experimentation completely. Such goals were doomed to fail in the long run. Why? Well, for one thing, some practical and logical thinking was needed even to find out how practical and logical thinking can be stamped out! Gregory's own aristocratic education had taught him useful secular habits, like how to increase someone’s power. With such skills he thus helped increase his own religious power over other bishops. At the time the Church was still very de-centralized and governed by district bishops, of which his Bishopric at Rome was merely one. Christianity at the time was similar to decentralized US banking in the 1800s. But, with Gregory’s own secular habit-arts, his job as Bishop of Rome slowly became more like the old empire itself, with its power being centralized and him eventually being called Pope, or papa!
Try as they might, then, Church leaders just could not completely disregard secular subjects like grammar and logical thinking. For another things, as congregations grew and sermons became more important, priests themselves had to learn good reading, speaking, and reasoning habits, and so rhetoric, grammar, and logic slowly became more and more important. Even in the late 700s Charlemagne (742-814) himself complained about many priests not being able to write or read very well; how could they convince parishioners of their Truth if they couldn't speak and write well themselves? Slowly, however, challenges from many different directions continue weakening the Christian goal of educational monopoly. One came from the great Frankish king Charlemagne himself.
A Secular Learning Door Stays Ajar
Even in the 600s Christian other-worldly schools were weak in Spain. One Isadore of Seville, for example, wrote about 30 books summarizing all secular knowledge at that time and place, even though much of it was largely based on merely accepting mythical beliefs and tall-tales without actually testing them for their accuracy. In that respect, he’s a good example of how weak the conscious art of experimental testing still was. If he could find someone who merely said something was true, that was enough for him; mere reliance on authority thus remained the main learning method in much of Christian Europe, rather than the much more powerful experimental learning art. And the more it was practiced, the more Christian ideas were challenged.
Then, beginning in the late 700s, Vikings added their challenges to Christian education practices. No doubt, learning to sail on the sea itself became a real challenge. The Vikings injected such exploratory energies into Europe, and in time would eventually open up a completely New World to explore, learn about, and if possible dominate as much as possible. After all, the Bible had justified slavery many centuries earlier.
In the quest for loot they began attacking all over Europe. Even while most people still felt spirits themselves directly caused them to think their thoughts, both good and sinful, Vikings began challenging people to think more about what's happening here and now, and how to defend themselves. For example, as they continued plundering all over Europe, looting and burning even Canterbury cathedral itself in the mid-800s, and again in the late 900s, monks adapted to the changing situation and simply migrated north into Scotland and Ireland, bringing with them whatever books they had, and reading them in their little stone huts. With Charlemagne however, the Northern European secular educational door was opened wider; his education leader named Alcuin, in fact wanted schools built throughout the kingdom, so more people could learn to speak and write more clearly. Charlemagne probably couldn’t write well himself, but he loved to collect books, probably had them redd to him, and kept a castle school at Aachen in no
Some 4 centuries after Gregory, Charlemagne began reminding people how useful secular kinds of knowledge are. He soon built a more progressive school at Aachen to which young, more secular minded young European nobles flocked to learn as much as they could about how to act like a gentleman, rather than just an obedient and faithful Christian. Naturally, as those new habits continued growing, curious and knowledge-loving people kept growing more secular and liberal habits.
Brutal and fearless Norse Vikings did something else to Christian Europe. They started injecting different secular energies into European life to actively learn more about life and nature. In their raids they satisfied their desire for trinkets, adventure, and knowledge, eventually sailing all the way to North America and much of Europe as well! They began pillaging any English and Irish monastery for their valuable gold, silver, and jewels. Like US Robber Barons in the 1800s, and many greedy people today, gold and silver were valuable for buying the power, respect, and high social status many craved. Vikings traveling east eventually founded Moscow in the 800s and, when necessary, even hauled their small boats overland, finally reaching Constantinople itself.
No doubt, in the process they took barbarity and brutality to new heights, but they also injected great amounts of explorative energy, bravery, and curiosity into Europe, not to mention warfare. Such learning habits and energies had been lacking for centuries. Eventually, however, as the Norsemen were converted to Christianity, many priests who had migrated to Ireland simply came back into Europe and there also helped re-energize a more secular educational model. So, along with the quest for loot, Viking curiosity about the natural world was a big help in breaking Christianity's other-worldly educational monopoly. Exploring and learning more about our natural world simply made life much more interesting and challenging; there was, in fact, much more to their god's world than any Christian hermit, monk, or pope ever dreamed existed. Eventually, its knowledge and facts became the only way life can ever be improved.
Also, in the 800s, more secular schools began growing in Italy. At Salerno, for example, a medical school was founded and began directly challenging the Church's restrictions on human dissection; thus human anatomy began growing. There thousands of students from all over Europe continued disregarding the Church's restrictions. And also, as Muslims continued capturing more of Spain, southern France, and Italy, they brought with them more secular studies. Thus, some 2 centuries before 1000 CE, the Church's conservative educational monopoly was weakened by many different sources. As a result, more and more people began realizing it's practically impossible to entirely close off human thinking, learning, and controlling the natural world with religious habits. Sooner or later people get tired of focusing on just one set of rituals for salvation. It thus became easier for people like Charlemagne to keep re-igniting secular learning; he also collected a great many ancient books and inspired noblemen to build more secular castle schools like his own. Thus, to more and more people religion itself started feeling as merely one set of habit among many, rather than the only subject worth studying, and the only ideas worth knowing.
If ever there was a godfather of France's 1700s Enlightenment, Charlemagne was it. In his school he taught character habits; young noble boys were to practice the aristocratic habits worthy of their class and the gentler side of their religion. Eventually a code of chivalry evolved, in which helping the poor and defending helpless women became an important part of Christian character building. Robin Hood was far from the first protector of the poor.
Of course conservative monastery schools continued focusing on teaching Biblical spirit-ideas and rituals, praying, and singing their Gregorian chants. For them such educational excellence was the Only Truth, everlasting and eternally unchanging; in most everyone such habits remained strong and propulsive. No doubt, such schools kept demanding group obedience to Christian values, and for about 600 years, until 1000, the Church pretty much kept a virtual educational monopoly. For those who learned to read, the Bible remained the only book worth reading, much like students today are anchored to their textbooks in our conservative schools. After all, it was essentially the ancient model Plato and Aristotle used; both anchored thinking to reasoning about and contemplating what they said were already-existing eternal objects.
Eventually, as more modern ideas of truth evolved, a big difference was seen. Essentially the conservative model of truth is backward-looking. Only knowing already-existing objects and ideas could produce eternal Truth and learning excellence, like already existing spirits or natural Forms, and so only books about those ideas should be studied. Thus mere contemplation and reading became the best learning method. The truth is what someone long ago said was the truth! Perhaps the best example of that idea was the Mosaic tradition; Mosaic writings already saw the truth, and so only they need be studied. To this day orthodox Jews still practice that art of debating what they really mean. For Isadore too, the Truth already existed and learning it was merely a question of reading the right books.
However, with the growth of more liberal models of nature and learning, natural curiosity could best be satisfied only with a forward-looking experimental testing model! As mentioned earlier, the forward-looking medical school at Salerno began dissecting corpses to learn more about disease and anatomy, rather than keep relying on prayer and using relics to cure diseases. So, as nature was pictured in more liberal terms, with ideas like atoms, more people became liberated to first experimentally learn how nature moves, and then use such knowledge to actually keep building a more satisfying world. Thus a more liberal forward-looking educational model began growing. In it reliable facts were best used as practical tools, rather than as merely something to accept or keep debating about. The debate moved from understanding a meaning to actually how such ideas should be used. For example, how does reproduction actually occur, and how should, say, a woman be allowed to control her own reproductive events? Naturally, in the late Middle Ages, as that more forward-looking experimental model of truth kept growing, it continued challenging conservative educational models. With the new liberal model, truth wasn't merely accepting already existing ideas, it was something we continue creating and discovering with intelligent and creative experimentation, like inventing new tools and objects to make life better!
Then, after 1000 CE, a kind of psychic dam seemed to burst. More thinking people became greatly disillusioned with the important religious idea of a Second Coming. Why was god waiting over a 1000 years to send Jesus back to earth to build a heavenly kingdom? As a result, more people liberated themselves from such ideas. Even in the 1000s some were questioning god's existence itself! They heard about Muslim skeptics denying the Christian god altogether! So, at England's most famous cathedral, Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1104) wrote a famous argument he said proved god exists. It goes something like this: god is the most perfect idea of which can be thought, and because perfection must include existence, god itself must exist! Philosophers and undergraduates have been taking about it ever since.
In the late 1100s Peter Abelard was no doubt the most powerful Church critic of his time. He wrote a book called Yes and No in which he showed about 100 important religious questions could be answered with both yes and no! Thus, after 1000, there began a rather interesting sequence of events in Europe. As more and more secular studies began growing with the founding of universities, there also began a series of religious wars, no doubt aimed at solidifying peoples' religious beliefs; today they're called the Crusades! War thus helped divert people from more progressive thinking.
As Abelard was challenging conservative religious leaders to think more clearly about their ideas, the 1st Crusade began in 1096. Pope Urban 2 got a call for help from the Byzantine emperor for troops, and so to create volunteers he promised forgiveness from their sins if they joined the army. The University of Bologna was also founded in the late 1000s. It began training lawyers to start focusing on words and their meanings much more clearly than before.
As the University of Paris was taking form in the mid-1100s, a 2nd Crusade was launched in 1147. It lasted but 2 years. Evidently the army organized its own leaders who then led a rebellion against the whole campaign; already they saw no real reason for traveling all the way to Palestine just to capture Jerusalem and then see the Muslims re-conquer it a few years later.
As Oxford University was being founded in the late 1100s a 3rd Crusade began in 1189, led by England's pious Richard 1. It would last some 3 years and accomplish practically nothing except learning more about the more advanced Muslim civilization at the time.
A 4th Crusade began in 1202, lasting about 2 years, and shortly after that Cambridge University was founded in 1209. Even a Children's Crusade formed in 1212, many of them already believing god would help their cause with miracles. In fact, many children froze and starved to death on the way to Palestine. Needless to say, those events were educational to many. There was much more to life than there was in any religious book.
Then, as the 1200s unfolded, many more universities were founded. No doubt they still focused on teaching Christian ideas and habits, but even so, the Church's infamous Inquisition was also founded, to help keep dissent and free-thinking to an absolute minimum, as well as cause many scholars to fear such thinking. So, did the Church use warfare to help combat a growing secular movement, as perhaps even the US government used World War 1 and 2 to help weaken a serious liberal threat to its powerful conservative upper class -- the widespread Progressive and Labor movements? Interesting questions, are they not, especially if we look at the events causing the US to go to war at those times? In any case, however, one fact remains obvious: war and violence have often interrupted and delayed many different kinds of progressive democratic movements. Did military generals convince naïve President Johnson to escalate the Vietnam War to help stall liberal programs in congress?
Ultimately, however, a complete conservative otherworldly educational goal was almost impossible to keep in place. Again, it went against human nature and nature itself! For hundreds of millions of years, nature had selected animals who were better at exploring more of the surroundings, using their senses and brains to find food, safety, and reproductive opportunities. Even 2 million years ago, our early human ancestors boldly felt such curious and experimental instincts. Tool-making habits began building an instinctive feeling: life can be improved with a little constructive and inventive tool making, thus making food easier to get and life more worth living. And since then, the instinct had only grown stronger, becoming ingrained in anyone who actually practices such learning skills. As a result, it was almost impossible to completely snuff out the desire to merely accept the world as it is, and keep bearing its pains and sorrows.
Early Muslim educational habits, however, weren’t nearly so conservative. Scholars there had redd their Aristotle and so it was easier for them to build universities centuries before Christian Europe, even in Timbuktu. Eventually from Muslim scholars in Spain would come copies of Aristotle's lecture notes, soon translated into Latin, and then on to Europe. In the 1200s at the newly formed University of Paris Thomas Aquinas would use them to wean the Church from the other-worldly Platonic educational foundation Augustine had built for it. Thomas’s replacing it with an Aristotelian sense-based model of learning was, no doubt, another major turning point in Western civilization’s educational history. Curiosity and exploration were irrepressible instinctive feelings for many people, and they continued helping justify a much more liberal education model, one much closer to liberal Democritus than to conservative Plato. The result was liberating; today even religious universities include scientific studies as part of their curriculum. That's more good news for we liberals who are now working to educate people about how they too can help liberate our educational and political systems from control and dominance by a small wealthy conservative class who continue trying to monopolize their control over both of them. Since the late 1930s they have been quite successful at controlling more money and the educational media, but how long it will last is now becoming a serious question; too many other educational tools have developed since then, helping more people feel more educational options.
Life Itself Challenged Conservative Religious Ideas
No doubt, teaching only conservative spirit-models of life continued giving hope to fearful and uneducated people living within a still unscientific and very dangerous world. But Periodic plague often killed thousands even as most children were taught to feel devils were literally everywhere, and also feel life itself was merely a short cosmic test for an eternally perfect heavenly reward. Most everyone continued believing nature was seething with uncontrollable evil spirits bent on increasing their numbers with corrupting thoughts, temptations, and pleasurable actions, commonly called sins. Prayer books remained important. Thus, life itself was challenging many basic religious ideas. Many thoughtful people began questioning basic Christian ideas. For example, how could an all-merciful god save only some and condemn most everyone else to eternal punishment even before the universe was created!
Devastating plague beginning in the 1300s kept sweeping through towns and cities killing thousands. How could an all-loving and powerful god allow such senseless events? Ever-changing life itself was thus helping educate people to see it differently from the status quo conservative model. Although many were taught to believe god was punishing sinners, people also saw how good and faithful people were dying, so again, how could an all-merciful god allow such events? Why wouldn't an all-good and powerful god simply end all suffering? What kind of a god allows good people to suffer needlessly?
The conservative educational model of life and nature was weakening with nature's help itself. No doubt, most people continued accepting the ideas priests told them were true, like god might miraculously heal good people, but ultimately many natural events were beyond all understanding and thus mysterious. Thus learning options were restricted to old religious arts and habits. Completely natural sexual thoughts continued being seen as coming from devils themselves! Such simplified and ultimately mysterious Platonic-like reasoning remained strong, but for many, the all-important will and instinct for questioning such ideas was growing stronger with more confident and independent learning habits! So, even as monks and nuns still chanted for hours every day lest they too be lured to hell-fire in a world awash with legions of unspeakably evil spirits, new kinds of secular thinking and questioning skills were growing. More people stopped making the sign of the cross for driving evil spirits away; they didn’t seem to do much good against plague and disease anyway. Also, if god was perfect reasoning, then how could it even create illogical religious systems? And if we were all created in god’s image, then why should any idea be beyond our reasoning powers?
At the heart of that more liberal questioning habit-art lay active experimental and questioning instincts and impulses. As mentioned earlier, soon after 1000 CE the French scholar Peter Abelard, and later the Englishman William of Occam (1287-1347), would openly challenge and question many of the Church’s religious ideas of Truth, like exactly what could be known about spirit-objects with reason alone? Such questions challenged the very reliability of such ideas! Were they merely true or merely assumptions necessary for theologians to build their religious models of life and nature? In that dawning secular and scientific world, even a few religious people began asking how mere reason alone could produce accurate and reliable knowledge. How could merely reading books ever teach anyone how reliable and truthful any idea is, or how to actually make the world a better place?
Thus the conservative educational art of passively reading and accepting ideas was challenged itself! Such challenges thus continued weakening the conservative religious monopoly on teaching only religious ideas. Why bother mentioning such facts. Well, such habits are still at work today in our modern conservative schools. Today we liberals shouldn't believe our schools are much different from medieval ones, just because we now have computers and many scientific facts. In fact, the passive teaching method in both medieval and modern conservative schools is the same. Students are still not completely free from that passive learning model of merely reading more and more book-facts. Today conservative public schools continue teaching the same kinds of passively accepting habits about secular facts. They tell students what should be studied while ignoring how to use their knowledge to keep making our world more democratic and equal! As a result, most children today are still psychically anchored to their teachers and textbooks, but without putting their ideas to any real constructive use and test. Thus, such ideas remain weak and unfelt, and are thus often quickly forgotten. They still have no real emotional depth to them. What’s more, character habits have also been almost completely ignored on a formal learning level.
In any case, after 1000 CE, the natural world's facts started becoming the objects of knowledge, and what's more, learned with a new experimental testing method. In England and France fearless and robust Norse invaders became Christians, but their curious instincts, built with exploring habits, eventually helped make simple acceptance of confusing Christian ideas even more difficult for more people, like Abelard and Occam. Scholars quickly turned such instincts into questions. If god is perfect rationality, for example, then how can it possibly create non-rational religions like Christianity? Such questions became more common in the newly formed universities, even though they remained overwhelming Christian.
Also, as Viking sailing skills increased their confident feelings to keep exploring the natural world, they too helped build more useful knowledge and facts about nature, and thus helped build a new, more active experimental learning model, even if it was still on a subconscious level. Soon places like Italy, England, western France, and the Netherlands continued building universities, and focusing more on learning more about our natural world, thus helping clear the way for a more liberal humanistic Renaissance movement begun in Italy in the 1300s.
As we've seen, in the 1200s several universities were founded and became places where young folks could ask more intelligent questions about both religious and natural truth. How were they related to each other? Did each kind of truth exist in completely different realms, or were there some religious ideas reason could discover, like proving god exists? Was god’s existence provable, or was it merely another assumed idea? Slowly, such questions and logical reasoning became part of the new experimental thinking scene, at the University of Paris and then at Oxford in England. More students thus became more conscious of them, thanks to some of their teachers. At them intelligent students too began asking more fundamental philosophic questions, like do eternal and unchanging objects really exist, if so what are their natures, and if not, what’s the best way to start learning about our ever changing world? What really are universal ideas like god and the soul? Are they just ideas and words, and do universal ideas like tree and mankind really exist? If they do, then where are they, in objects themselves, or in another spirit-realm, and also, how can we test those ideas?
Thus, at least at the higher levels of learning, liberal philosophic questioning began challenging young folks to build a new, more secular learning model. If there were literally hundreds of religious models, then how could anyone claim only one was the eternal Truth? In the early 1000s western France had absorbed enough robust and independent Norse energies to begin asking such questions. In fact, Abelard became such a dynamic teacher he quickly took students away from more conservative ones, like mystical Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153). Eventually, however, Abelard lost his academic freedom and retreated to monastic life. Morally and intellectually he just didn't fit into a church-controlled educational monopoly, but he was just the beginning.
Soon afterwards, other bold and curious scholars like Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, William of Occam, and Nicholas of Cusa continued experimenting with their questions. With them they continued liberating themselves and many students from conservative and doubtful religious ideas and habits. In the 1300s Occam’s reasoning became so sharp he quickly became a major thorn in the Church's side, eventually being excommunicated and fleeing to Germany for his life.
Slowly and surely, then, more confident and capable people kept asking more intelligent questions about our natural world, how it works, and most important of all, began testing their answers experimentally. Soon, the educational result was a completely new and different learning art: experimental learning. In England it had been growing since the 1200s! With some very capable men like Robert Grosseteste (d. 1253) and the Franciscan Roger Bacon (d.1292), experimental learning became a consciously active habit-art. They consciously used the same experimental testing art to answer their scientific questions as ancient doctors like Hippocrates had used in the 400s BCE to answer medical questions! Bacon discovered his senses helped produce many more reliable facts and knowledge than merely accepting on faith what the truth was. The rainbow, Bacon discovered with the new method, was caused by water and sunlight, rather than god. Scripture said rainbows were a sign from god there would be no more great floods.
Inside the universities, of course, the basic learning model remained quite conservative; the Bible remained the be-all and end-all of Truth. Old conservative learning models based on accepting book facts carried on pretty much as they had for the past 1000 years. Naive and unquestioning young students were simply told what to believe and practice, and so real forward-looking experimental learning habits stayed weak; most people continued relying on asking god's miraculous help for solving many of their problems, especially health problems. Even in Occam’s 1300s large scale liberation from such habits was still limited and weak, as Chaucer describes a group of pilgrims going to Canterbury to pray for miraculous cures. On the way, however, he gives us a marvelous glimpse of what the newly emerging secular world felt like even to common English people. Life was definitely becoming more secular, bawdy, this-worldly, and humanistic.
The early medieval learning model received another major shock with the work of Thomas Aquinas (1225?–1275). Decades earlier, Spanish Muslim scholars had brought Aristotle's work into Europe, and soon Latin translations were made of them. It was like a new education day's dawning. Thomas would eventually use many of Aristotle's moderate ideas of sense-based learning to rebuild Augustine's old conservative Christian model based mainly on faith and the Bible. To Plato and Augustine the entire natural sense-world should be ignored as a source of eternal Truth. At best its facts were only copies of nature's real and True spirit-objects. Thus, for Thomas and eventually the Church, all learning became a combination of reasoning based on the senses, rather than just reasoning alone. At first Thomas’s work was so revolutionary it was outlawed; eventually he was canonized. It’s yet another good example of how conservatives are almost forced, from time to time, to keep modernizing their models of life and nature.
No doubt, to us today Aquinas’ educational improvements sound trivial and unimportant. Most everyone today feels confident their senses are a natural and normal part of every learning process. Back then, however, such ideas were, in fact, revolutionary and even heretical! Conservative Christians like Benedict, Gregory, and Bernard were obsessed with mystically merging and uniting completely with a spirit-world, and thus absorbing directly its knowledge. Prayer and contemplative reasoning were still the favored learning method. Most everyone believed god had put eternally true ideas in peoples’ soul-minds, and thus reasoning and mystical embrace were the best ways to know eternal Truth. The senses were merely a distraction from that goal. For them, saying any of the senses were necessary for learning any kind of reliable truth merely opened the entire evil and devil-possessed natural world to temptation and sin! However, new exploring and business arts continued creating a new learning model, based on experience and experimental testing. With new ship-building and exploring energies, for example, more and more of Western mankind was simply becoming less afraid of nature itself, just like wild animals become less afraid of people when they’re treated kindly. Soon Thomas's different sense-based learning model was accepted, in which reason and the senses played a crucially important part. Some 300 years later modern science started blooming with the help of both the senses and reasoning.
Italy Led the Way
As with every new educational movement, progress was slow during the 1200s. But even as Dante was writing his Divine Comedy describing life in the spirit-world, more liberal humanist feelings about life and nature were blooming in England, and then in Italy. No doubt, they were encouraged by the secular Medici banking family in Florence. Then, in the early 1400s, a major breakthrough happened. The young humanist Italian Renaissance movement began producing real philosophic options for people to learn and think about. Medici leaders knew how important education was for liberating people from conservative learning models, and so naturally they wanted more ancient liberal writings found; some may be still hidden away in monastery libraries throughout Europe. Luckily the Vikings wanted loot, and so left the libraries alone.
That book-finding mission was given a big boost by one Poggio Bracciolini (d. 1453; I pronounce it Pozzio Brasseolini). In his spare time he would travel northward and rummage around dusty cathedral libraries in Germany and France, looking for ancient literary treasures. Eventually he struck liberal gold; he found a rare copy (only 3 were found) of Lucretius’s atomistic poem On Nature, as well as many other ancient authors spared from Viking and barbarian torches. At first it was redd merely for its poetry, but when educated people began actually reading it for its liberal Atomistic ideas, rather than just its poetry, the entire liberal Greek Atomistic model of life and nature once again began teaching people some real philosophic options were available for study. On Nature helped fashion a more secular model of life itself, and the more it was tested, the more reliable its atomistic ideas became. Leonardo (d. 1519), Machiavelli (d. 1527), and Michelangelo (d. 1564) also became 3 more very important examples of the new humanist movement.
Leonardo was so creative he was allowed to pretty much experiment with whatever interested him most. In that process, however, he helped found the modern liberal experimental learning process. Like Aristotle before him, Aquinas used the senses merely to learn nature's already existing truths, and then reason about them. Leonardo, however, took the final step: actually testing ideas experimentally for their forward-looking results, and see how reliable they were. To him it was the best way to discover any reliable and useful fact! At both the beginning and end of a learning process, he said, our senses must be used. At first they show us what we want to learn more about, and after creating a plan then our senses again show what forward-looking results are produced! Thus, with Leonardo's help, actual future results became the new objects of knowledge, and they could be learned only with the senses, not merely contemplative reasoning. In essence, then, our best learning art was active and experimental, rather than passive and contemplative. It's really a tribute to conservative power such a passive and book-centered learning model has remained dominant in our conservative public schools to this day. They have known for centuries how destructive to their feudalistic political, economic, and educational monopolies an experimental learning model would be. It helps liberate the next generation from merely passively accepting a feudalistic and medieval status quo, wherever it exists.
No doubt, the new experimentally active learning model would have become much more widespread much sooner if Leonardo hadn't been such a private person and kept his notebooks to himself. However, it merely delayed the all but inevitable! As an entire New World was opening up in the Americas, Niccolo Machiavelli used his sense-experience to take political philosophy to a level not seen since pragmatic ancient Greek Sophists said power, both economic and military, is the only creator of right and good. Today power politics is a widely accepted idea. His Prince told would-be rulers how best to both seize and hold power. You bribe who you can and attack and weaken those you can't! It's basically the way the US system has been working for many decades now, at least since the late 1800s. For many greedy corporate leaders and conservative politicians today it's still the most useful model to keep increasing their power. And of course using art to support the status quo has been continued being another tool in the conservative kit to dampen and dilute progressive democratic improvements.
Michelangelo's nudes on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling were another example of how conservatives controlled progressive artists for their own educational aims. His nudes were too radical for conservative eyes; they might increase the desire for worldly pleasures, and thus ignore Church moral teachings. So other painters were soon hired to fig-leaf them over. And in many ways today, the visual arts have become much more controlled by conservatives, and thus less threatening. They simply support those artists who don't mind ignoring liberal ideas like equality and democracy; they often support and popularize their work with grants, commissions, and public showings. As examples we can point to the abstract, pop, and op-art movements in the 20th century, trivial TV shows controlled by a handful of large corporations, all of which are largely devoid of any critical social thinking and relevancy. Many entertain like Roman circuses. Chris Hedges' The Death of the Liberal Class goes into much more detail about controlling artists with conservative money.
Little wonder then, in the early 1500s the conservative Catholic religious monopoly was shattered. Such feelings had been growing even in the 1300s. As critical questions continued being asked with the help of curious experimenting monks like Bacon, it was merely a question of time before basic religious ideas themselves began to be questioned, thus challenging its educational model as well. For example, if salvation depended merely on faith, as Paul said, then why would religious rituals and priests be needed at all? Couldn’t people simply pray directly to god? After all, Jesus prayed directly to his god, not to his rabbi. Also, religious artwork wasn't necessary; weren't they just distractions from praying? Clearly, such protesting questions kept taking religious reasoning and education beyond conservative levels of thinking, and to a new Protestant religious movement.
Such ideas were already growing in the 1300s. Slowly, a more individual picture of religious truth grew. More liberal theologians like John Wycliff (d. 1384) in England and Jan Hus (d. 1415) in Bohemian began denying the need for priests altogether; for them each person has the right to paint their own religious picture and commune directly with their god. Even at that time theirs was a back-to-the-Bible movement, challenging the entire Catholic educational system of sacraments, rituals, and art work. Soon the new Protestant churches would have no religious statues or symbols and many different religious ideas. Religion itself was becoming more democratic. Some even rejected the Church's ideas of free will altogether, and instead opted for a theological determinism: god knew who would be saved even before the universe was created. Later liberals would ask how that idea can possibly be justified along with ideas about god's perfect goodness and mercy. How could such a god purposely condemn innocent people to eternal pain and punishment?
A few decades later much of Catholic Europe itself erupted into violence when Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation with the same kinds of questions. After all, the Bible said nothing about needing a priest for forgiveness, so why practice confession, or paying anyone to absolve one’s sins? Such ideas needn't be taught to children. Thus, the educational question about what should be taught to young folks suddenly changed in a fundamental way, along with the entire learning process as well! Religious truth moved from merely faith and trust in the Church rituals to intelligent Bible reading itself! Suddenly the art of careful reading, and learning what the Bible actually said, became more important in Protestant schools than ever before; after all, most people couldn't even read their Latin Bibles. Luther translated the Bible into German.
Thus, the new learning model of excellence said use your senses to read carefully, and also your reason to then ask more intelligent questions about what it said! Eventually modern theologians would ask, did Jesus really die to save all mankind, or was his repentance mission directed only at the Jewish community? Why did he cry out while being crucified and feel god had forsaken him? As god didn’t he already know what would happen to him? With such questions modern theology would become more concerned. In fact truth itself was becoming more personalized. In the late 1500s Edward (Shakespeare) DeVere eventually said it like this: Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so. It certainly wasn't the best model of truth; actual and real results of active testing make any idea right or wrong, but it shows how much stronger individualistic ethical ideas were growing at the time. Pleasure itself was emerging from its medieval cocoon.
No doubt, this more liberal forward-looking experimental educational model grew slowly with a series of small baby-steps, but it did go forward at the university level, and as it did also gained momentum. Finally, our modern liberal educational model of learning about life and nature with intelligent experimentation reached a critical point and began flowering in the 1600s. Around Europe curious experimenters set up little private scientific labs still forbidden in the universities, where ideas could be actively tested for their reliable results. It was as if millions of years of subconscious experimental feelings and instincts finally burst into a more conscious light of day. We live today in a world where such learning habits continue growing, but where, sadly, our public schools still largely restrict students from practicing such an active, creative, and forward-looking learning art in their own communities.
The Modern Breakthrough
With such small learning baby-steps, our most reliable and powerful experimental learning art began growing on a conscious level, rather than staying on just a subconscious behavioral level, as it had been for millions of years. In time, then, more and more educated people began accepting nature's great challenge to use their senses and creativity to help ask more intelligent questions, see more options, and then experimentally test their ideas for their future results. In that new learning system truth was something to discover, not merely something to read about and passively accept. Active experimentation began teaching young folks how life and nature actually worked, and also how such facts and knowledge could help make life better, more satisfying, and less fearful and superstitious. Soon France's secular civilization-changing Enlightenment burst into bloom.
Slowly but steadily experimental learning itself continued becoming a conscious habit-art as a more naturalistic model of life emerged from its medieval cocoon of passively accepting religious ideas on faith. That movement continued happening in both England and Italy, and education couldn’t help but be affected. In 1700s France a radical individualistic educational model was built with Jean Rousseau's Emile. It tried liberating young folks from conservative schools by saying they should study whatever they wanted. It would take many decades more to put such ideas into practice. For Rousseau, conservative schools generally trained young folks to accept the social and cultural status quo, and thus helped corrupt children’s basic natural goodness and feelings of equality; the idea helped form the Romantic Movement in the 1800s. For him conservative schools merely taught feudal and superstitious habits, and kept society divided into different tribes and classes as well as helping justify religious wars. Both Catholic and Protestant educators taught children to merely accept their ideas as the absolute Truth. Thus intolerance for different views increased. For Rousseau, to build a better and more democratic world, students needed the freedom to educate themselves, so their natural goodness could create that more just and equal democratic world.
For Dewey, however, that psychology was just too optimistic. For him children are neither naturally good nor evil; they all learn such habits only with active training, practice, and rewards. But both agreed: our schools definitely have a more active social role to play in helping build democratic habit-arts in the next generation. If not, then conservative schools will continue teaching the habits of a basically feudal society: obedience, class divisions, and passive acceptance. With such habits wars become much easier to fight and much easier for wealthy folks to continue making money. Still, many today feel Rousseau was right, and want their children to have as much educational freedom as possible; schools like Summerhill are still available today.
As we saw in the first section, building our modern more liberal democratic world based on equal rights and opportunities has been anything but a complete break with feudal schools. In fact, in many ways our conservative schools have been making it easier for such habits to continue on! Many of our modern political, economic, and educational institutions are feudalistic in nature; people today still have the power to elect only a few representatives, corporations are still run on a feudal model from the top decision-makers down to the workers, and schools still require students keep passively obeying their teachers and keep learning more book-facts. Meanwhile, our wealthy upper class and corporations continue building the kind of political and social world making it easy to keep making more money!
Not surprisingly, even in the late Middle Ages, some people aimed to build a more moderate learning model. Born in liberal Holland, for example, at first Christian Desiderius Erasmus (d. 1536), tried combining new secular humanist educational ideas with his conservative ones; they might help end brutal and vicious religious wars. Where both Descartes and Spinoza later lived, more tolerant ideas and feelings were growing as wealthy folks helped build more modern schools and international businesses. In many of them, often taught by secular-oriented teachers, all-important character habits like tolerance and respect for just laws were taught in addition to language and grammar skills. Given devastating religious warfare at the time, such tolerance was sorely needed. New canons and firearms also made stealing gold and silver from the New World's frightened and superstitious native peoples almost too easy.
Erasmus too felt much less fearful and paranoid about spirits, and more confident real knowledge and character habits could be taught, helping control peoples' destinies. He believed in free-will, rather than Protestant predestination. Thus, emphasizing a more liberal secular model of character excellence continue growing in more liberal schools; natural knowledge was ours for discovering, but using such knowledge wisely depended on one's character habits. They were also important for lowering one's fear of religious diversity, as well as feeling divided and separated from nature itself, as Christian models often taught. In short, with his help more people came to feel more Democritean rather than Augustinian. Said simply, learning new secular character habit-arts, especially political democracy and experimental science, helped more people feel more comfortable and at home in nature, and after him those feelings continued encouraging the growth of each person's individual talents. A modern liberal model of education thus continued emerging.
Another early modern baby-step might be mentioned. It was taken by John Locke (d. 1704). Like both Aristotle and Leonardo, Christian Puritan Locke too said all knowledge depended on sense experience. Eventually such ideas helped Charles Darwin (d. 1882) research his naturalistic ideas on a 5 year voyage, and eventually publish his Origin of Species and Descent of Man. They all but sealed the door on conservative models of life, nature, and education. His work encouraged people to see both learning and human life as completely within natural forces, just as liberal Democritus and the Atomists had done thousands of years earlier! Such re-born liberal ideas thus became a real alternative to a conservative education, helping liberate students from obedience to their conservative teachers and increasing democratic habits and feelings for equal rights. Thus modern liberal education itself became more of a naturalistic art and science. In the next section we'll see a few more of its modern highlights.
4. EDUCATIONAL HIGHLIGHTS: MODERN
Our Modern World Emerges
No doubt, the most important modern educational improvement was the habit-art of testing ideas experimentally. As our modern age continued emerging, experimental testing became the most powerful learning art for secular-minded people. For example, as conservatives like Rene Descartes (d. 1649) and materialists like Thomas Hobbes (d. 1679) continued using reason as the best learning method, experimental testing was growing with the help of people like Francis Bacon (d. 1626). He talked about its basic ideas and power for turning anyone into a kind of knowledge matador, useful for slaying much of the mythical and superstitious bulls still living; they were fed on what someone else said was true. And most importantly of all, he also said such new experimental facts should be used to liberate all of mankind from poverty, disease, and ignorance. He was one of Dewey’s favorite writers and was called almost the perfect example of the growing humanist movement.
During the 1500s, 3 other major movements continued weakening the medieval philosophic and educational models. They were religious Reformation, the humanistic Renaissance, and world exploration. After Isaac Newton (1727) demonstrated science’s power to see all of nature as governed by its own self-operating 'laws', it seemed as if the modern world’s medieval bullfight with feudalistic systems had finally turned a crucially important corner. To many educated people, experimental testing was rapidly building an entirely new set of natural facts, useful in both science and education. The new, more powerful, experimental learning art not only discovered useful and reliable facts, but also allowed people to become their own learning master, and thus guide their own individual growth! Learning itself became democratized in the many small personal research labs growing outside the universities. Anyone could experiment with their own ideas; the challenge was to make such learning intelligent, rather than routine. The new experimental learning art also began affecting political democratic thinking as well.
For example, after England's Glorious Revolution of 1688, political thinkers like John Locke experimented with building a Bill of Rights for all citizens, thus helping nurture democracy's growth. Enforcing such rights then became the state's new responsibility, of which education was one. Thus science’s more powerful experimental learning art began challenging feudalistic conservatives as never before. Not even in ancient Greece was the modern liberal democratic movement so strong. And, as the still more secular 1700's Enlightenment unfolded across western Europe, more and more progressive matadors wanted modern science to give conservative education its final coup de grace.
With such feelings education itself became more of a naturalistic art and science; what can children learn and when's the best time to teach them such facts? And so our modern studies of child psychology began growing. Hopes were so high in France, many liberal philosophes there were certain people learn all their ideas beginning in childhood, and so unlimited social progress towards equality was possible after building the right institutions, schools included. For them, at least in theory, humankind could keep improving with better schools and learning better habit-arts as life and nature kept changing. Education itself thus continued becoming a very important part for any kind of human progress. In many ways Dewey felt the same optimism, especially during the Progressive Era in the early 1900s. The only thing standing in the way of building more improved liberal schools was undereducated parents, feudalistic conservatives, and of course teachers who really didn't want to build more democratic schools. Many of them preferred to keep control students in their seats and working on an endless stream of book-assignments, even though the large majority would never even graduate high school, much less go to college.
Early Modern Models of Education
Naturally, early in the 1600s many people had both conservative and modern habits, like Aristotle too had in ancient Athens. As we saw earlier Erasmus was another such writer. Thus, his educational model included both liberal humanist and conservative religious ideas. He certainly wasn't alone. In fact, in the conservative philosophic work of Descartes, Spinoza (d. 1677), and Leibniz (d. 1716), they too built more modern models of life and nature while using the old conservative learning method of mere contemplation and logical reasoning. To them, and to Plato and Aristotle, experimental learning simply couldn't produce the kind of eternal and unchanging knowledge they wanted to see.
In Holland too, during the 1500s, liberal social and religious habits of tolerance were already growing; their more peaceful results helped make life safer for everyone. In 1492 it even welcomed Jews expelled from Spain, Spinoza’s ancestors included. Thus, for such early modern humanists, liberal habits of character excellence, like tolerance, were stressed in schools, in addition to learning reading, writing, and grammar skills. Said Erasmus: “…I … tried … to raise … young people from … ignorance to pure studies.” For him “learning should promote the seeds of piety … love … the liberal studies … the duties of life … and good manners.” In other words, a modern liberal model of education was emerging, involving knowledge, skills, and character training. As they did, then, conservative habits of seeing one's truth as the eternal and only Truth kept growing weaker.
Even though Erasmus said Latin should still be the language of all educated Europeans, he also suggested a much more naturalistic and playful method of learning, rather than mere passive and contemplative book study. His more liberal learning ideas told him games and speaking activities would do more to teach grace and grammar than all the books about them. It was another early example of behavioral learning methods; children best learn what they practice, not what they merely read. Character habits like tolerance for peaceful people were sorely needed as the Reformation was just getting underway and of course religious wars continued needlessly wasting both lives and money. In 1572, for example, Catholics in Paris murdered Protestant leaders in cold blood, ordered by King Charles 2 himself and his mother, Catherine de Medici.
However, Erasmus’s moderate educational model still had 2 important weaknesses. It not only neglected experimental learning for producing our strongest knowledge, but it also left the lower classes out of the educational picture. As a result, a medieval class structure continued on, rather than a more democratic one. Even though he knew about the new experimental learning art and its testing method of discovering useful and reliable natural facts, he still ignored it in favor of teaching classical Latin and Greek literature as the main subjects. And of course, ignoring the lower classes and not teaching them creative and inventive habits helped keep them in the lower classes, thus making democratic progress much less than what it could have been!
Greater sea explorations than even the Vikings also played a great part in breaking the old medieval fear of the natural world, thus making experimental learning our most important learning tool. Within a growing dynamic, expanding, and energetic Renaissance world, it was only a question of time before such sea voyages became yet another sign of Western Europe's growing confidence about how to actively learn more about our natural world, and thus more easily keep improving it for the public good.
No doubt, there were both good and bad results from those voyages, depending, of course, on whether conservatives or liberals were defining the public good. On the liberal side, such explorations continued building the feeling for our world as governed by natural laws, rather than supernatural spirits. In fact, many US Founders in the 1700s were deists; a solitary god cared nothing for our natural world and basically contemplated its own ideas. On the bad side, however, armed with new canons and firearms, brutal warfare with Stone Age natives resulted in thousands being killed as their gold and silver was simply looted and stolen. Some of it would help pay Michelangelo for painting the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. It was yet another bad omen of how important money was becoming to greedy people. To this day that habit-art continues corrupting our political and economic institutions. Even Plato saw the socially corrosive results of such habits.
Education reform also was helped by the Protestant Reformation. Some of Martin Luther’s educational ideas are enlightening to see. As Germany became more and more Protestant, many of the Catholic schools ceased to exist, and so Luther quickly felt the need to build a new educational model based on his more individualistic religious ideas. Without such a model he knew people would keep practicing Catholic habits and rituals. He thus wrote a number of new educational catechisms and spent a year translating the New Testament into German, so people could read it for themselves and see why he criticized Catholicism's model.
He also took another very important educational baby-step. He began talking about an idea we keep practicing to this day: state sponsored universal compulsory education, for both boys and girls of all classes! Even in the early 1500s he was still much more of a democrat than Erasmus. It was as if the old German hatred of Rome suddenly found yet another justification for rejecting its religious ideas! Only a more educated society could more easily keep practicing more enlightened religious ideas. So in place of a feudal school system run from Rome, Luther substituted a more individualistic secular school system, each run by the local German prince, of which there were hundreds.
However, just as today, he soon faced another major problem – financing. With people still divided into great medieval extremes of rich and poor, and having almost no extra money to finance such schools, how could local princes build such a system? Most everyone were still poor subsistence farmers and peasants living from one growing season to the next. If nothing else, however, Luther was creative. Eventually, he simply suggested children go to school only for a couple hours a day, then go home and learn some of the practical farm skills they needed to keep their princes fed and clothed! Thus, with his help, the modern idea of universal public education continued growing in Europe.
Another Protestant reformer named John Calvin (d. 1654) agreed; both boys and girls should be educated. The logic was plain enough: Why waste precious human potential by not educating as many as possible, including women? After all, what has gender got to do with having a sharp brain? Medieval habits, however, showed how difficult it was to make a complete break with them. Both sexes should still be educated, but again in a Christian framework; the basic Christian character habits of faith, hope, and love would strengthen young folks against what he still felt were devils working to corrupt uneducated people, like Luther believed had happened to Catholic leaders in Rome. In spite of it, both of them felt one of modern education's important practical ideas: educating all young folks was the best way for any nation to more intelligently control its own growth and destiny. Dewey of course agreed, but disagreed with them about education's other 2 major questions: what should students be taught, as well as how they should learn their habits and ideas.
Practical Education
A few decades after Luther, other liberal German educators also encouraged universal education for both boys and girls, as well as playing useful educational games. They added, however, yet another important piece of the modern progressive educational movement -- occupational training. It remains an important part of German education to this day. The industrial revolution was just beginning, and they sensed education's role in training the next generation. Excellent learning itself was becoming more humanized and practical, as well as actively economically oriented, rather than remaining passively book-centered, even for younger children. People like Jean Rousseau and Heinrich Pestalozzi (d. 1827) said children need active and experimental learning.
Character training thus continued growing in Swiss schools even before 1800. What's more, Pestalozzi was one of the first to see Hume's old faculty psychology needing re-thinking, making it a more developmental and evolutionary model, rather than just treating young folks as having a weak set of fixed adult faculties. He was also more educationally more democratic too. He saw children have different interests and wanting to learn different ideas, and so it was counterproductive to group everyone in classes and teach them the same subjects; it only produced more discipline problems for teachers. For him such education was seen as having very important social results too, some darker than others. Germany, for example, was becoming a more unified nation, and so what rights and duties should children have in the new nation? Should the state be able to draft them to fight its wars, as Napoleon had done in the early 1800s, or should people have the freedom to choose when to endanger their lives? And so another very important question in modern education became, where exactly is the line between student rights and social duties? Conservatives, of course, wanted as much control over citizens as they could possibly have.
So, with the growth of democracy and public school systems, educational philosophy itself became a more important study, as it was for Plato. For many modern educators a number of new questions needed to be answered. How can we balance the 2 goals of teaching individual rights as well as social responsibility? What subjects should we teach young folks? What should the school curriculum be? Should they be taught merely book facts, military habits like the ancient Spartans had done, business skills for the emerging corporate world, character excellence, or what? What is educational excellence?
Also important was this question: How much individual freedom should students have in public schools, none, little, or much? In other words, where does student individual liberty end and state security begin? Does the state have an eternal right to make citizens fight all its wars? What role in education should the state have? Should it educate students to always obey it, or should that power be given to local and regional governments? Exactly what educational freedoms do students and the state have, and when should they be taught to students? Naturally conservatives like George Hegel (d. 1832) felt people owed the state complete obedience, while liberal democrats, and the newly evolving Libertarian political model of small government, felt individual rights were more important than any state. Only such individual freedom could help control any state from becoming yet another form of totalitarian tyranny.
Still, as the Industrial Revolution was growing, the 1830s were a time of new educational experiments. In France, for example, many independent and well-redd women began rejecting Rousseau’s male chauvinism and began writing about women’s education; why waste half of our human potential for excellence, especially at the university level? They knew some women are even smarter than most men, like, for example, Emilie du Chatelet (d. 1749). Even though she was denied a university education, she educated herself, eventually even correcting some of Newton’s scientific mistakes, and damn near discovered Einstein’s famous E = mc2 equation on her own! To this day she remains virtually unknown to most everyone.
Other new educational experiments were tried too. In Germany’s 1840s, for example, new ideas like kindergartens were tested. People began seeing the learning potential even in 5 year olds! They wanted to see if enjoyable sense-based games and songs really make children better learners in school, and often they did! Also educationally active at this time in Scotland was the great English humanist and Socialist Robert Owen. He had great success organizing a village school for children in the town where he ran a successful cloth-making factory. He thus quickly embraced Enlightenment educational optimism: all personal and social limitations can be expanding and improving with better educated children. With his help sending children to school rather than into a factory made life much easier and less stressful; the problem, however, was the limited small scale of his reforms. Even though he too celebrated the progressive idea of free universal education for all, most industrialists didn't, and, with the help of child workers, turned many English towns into polluted centers of cramped and expensive living.
Like Dewey, Owen saw education as the key to keep intelligently rebuilding old feudalistic antidemocratic habits of passive obedience to the status quo with the help of progressive and student-centered schools. And, of course, both wanted the government to become more active in that educational process. Without the government's help, conservative-run schools would continue teaching students local kinds of conservative habits, and thus making democracy even more difficult to grow. More corporate profit-conscious Britons wanted more freedom to keep making as much money as possible, while paying their workers as little as possible. Thus, to them, helping grow democratic feelings for equal rights should be ignored. Herbert Spencer (d. 1903) represented such a hard-hearted aristocratic social model. To him most people were naturally inferior, so why should the government bother educating or caring for them at all? Like Plato, many modern conservatives too often felt education should be confined to the upper and middle classes; if not, then democracy would keep growing and their power would keep shrinking. Radical laissez-faire thinkers like Spencer, who invented the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, said it would be useless to educate those whom nature had marked for early death and extinction. Thus, for him, the government shouldn't interfere with the natural processes of survival going on all around us. Life itself should be allowed to keep selecting the fittest to keep living without government interference. Such conservative and libertarian educational ideas went against almost all kinds of liberal government help for the poor, even if it made factories safer and old age easier. Such libertarian conservatives believed the government should keep helping make the wealthy even wealthier. Such ideas are still heard today, though perhaps not as openly as before! People have grown more hostile to such ideas since Spencer's day, and feel the government should play a bigger role in building a more democratic public good. Many today feel those who have obscene amounts of money should pay more for the privilege. As C. Wright Mills writes in The Power Elite about such conservatives:
"... People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves. ... the idea ... of having a finer moral character is an ideology of the elite as a privileged ruling stratum ... " (14)
Modern conservative ideas were often justified with Germany’s George Hegel (d. 1832) and his political ideas. For a while even Dewey himself was an Hegelian early in his teaching career. For Hegel, states were god’s tools for guiding life itself! Thus only the state can give people all their freedoms, liberties, and true individuality, and as a result it has the ultimate power over citizens, even the right to force people to die for it. In other words, the state was much more important than any individual democratic rights people might have; like Plato before him, democracy was a dangerous political habit to teach. It only encouraged feelings of equal rights and individualism. Like Plato, he wanted students conditioned to obey and support their national leaders more than anything else; the state itself was the source of all individual liberties and freedoms, and so students must learn to defend it always and unquestioningly, no matter what it did! For feudal obedience to the Church, Hegel thus substituted feudal obedience to the nation. For conservatives like him even today, the feeling was ‘my country, right or wrong’; whatever the state did, it deserved obedience; it was god's work itself! Instead of working together with atheistic communist governments, the Cold War was completely justified, Vietnam included. In the 1930s Adolph Hitler continued practicing Hegel’s ideas within his Nazi Party; people owed everything to the state.
Democratic liberals, however, had a very different feeling about the state's power. If the country is wrong about some idea or policy, then citizens have a duty to make it right. In many ways Deweyan liberals and Hegelian conservatives are still defined with those ideas today. Liberals today ask why shouldn't all people have the right to choose what wars to fight, how much their tax-supported government should spy on them, or even decide what their taxes should be used for? If not, then the result is yet another feudalistic government doing whatever wealthy folks want it to do, much like the US today in many ways. Many conservatives today continue working to take more and more of the public’s tax money, much of it in the name of national security.
Slowly, as great differences in educational models became defined, more practical questions were asked. How many days and years should young folks be compelled to go to school, and study what they’re told to study? How practical and work-oriented should public education be? Should all students be required to study world history, English literature, and geometry while not learning useful and employable skills, like intelligent work and character habits? No doubt Dewey and also President Franklin Roosevelt (d. 1945) wanted young folks learning some practical skills in school, not only in vocational schools but also in all public schools. During the Great Depression FDR wanted to keep teaching people useful work skills with job programs like the Civilian Conservation Corp and the National Youth Administration. In fact, some poor young folks were paid for some work while still going to school, much like today where many European schools have apprenticeship work programs for students. Such programs help lower unemployment rates among young folks, which normally are often much higher than other age groups. Many educators even today also talk about a national 2-year service requirement after high school, so students can get some real world experience before college, so they can better challenge their professors, rather than meekly keep accepting what they were told. Learning more about both conservative and liberal models of life and nature would thus make college a more intellectually meaningful experience.
Naturally, many US conservatives and libertarians were against giving the national government much educational power. After all, the Constitution said nothing about such federal power, and so it should be controlled by the states, as local politicians wanted. Liberals of course saw many weaknesses in that kind of school system. For example, even after the Civil War, many conservatives didn't want former African slaves educated at all; for them it would produce social and economic chaos, making good jobs less scarce. As a result of such locally controlled segregated educational systems, it was easy to keep conservative racial prejudices in place, and even terrorize Africans who wanted all the rights whites already had, especially voting rights. So, Africans and liberals were challenged to help build schools where such students could get a good education; one result was Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
What's more, as regular economic meltdowns like the Great Depression kept throwing social life for all poor folks into stressful chaos, more and more liberals wanted the Federal government to start playing a larger educational role. To them capitalism's eternal quest for ever greater profits seemed unable to keep educating everyone to practice intelligent democratic habits. In the 1930s, then, government became a larger tool for helping create more equal opportunities. In the 1940s, for example, the military began integrating the races. The liberal idea was local control of schools could no longer be trusted to keep expanding the public good and making life more democratic for everyone. The growth of income taxes gave liberal politicians the power to take a more active role in education and in peoples’ lives in general. Conservatives and libertarians, on the other hand, continued fighting that power with their laissez-faire political and economic ideas.
Early US Highlights
In the 1600s so-called Latin Grammar Schools were started in the colonies to help train more male clergymen, lawyers, and public servants. Feudally religious ideas of inequality allowed only boys to study reading, writing, and elementary math, as well as learn how to speak and write both Latin and Greek. Latin was useful for lawyers, and Greek for ministers. And in Puritan-founded Harvard, teenage boys were required to have such skills before entering.
Before independence in 1776, 9 religious controlled colleges were working in the American colonies; one Virginia school named for British rulers William and Mary taught Thomas Jefferson (d. 1826), but, a year before he died, epicurean Jefferson finally saw his own secular University of Virginia open with a little over 100 students. There, character habits were important, and eventually a code of honor was built for students. Excellent character habits like honesty were practiced in action, and students themselves made sure others acted the same way by reporting cheaters and liars to a student government, much like our military academies do today. Such honor codes no doubt continue to this day, if not openly then underground. Whether conservative or liberal, however, character excellence was still an important habit-art to learn, and the younger the better. People saw life itself is easier when honesty and lawfulness are respected, and so wanted their children learning such habits.
As with so many other new nations, US public schools continued growing during the 1800s. As the government gave federal land to the states they sold much of it and used the money to build schools. Often such schools were practical, and emphasized agricultural research. The Industrial Revolution was just beginning and so farming was still what most people did; agriculture thus became the economy’s base, especially cotton-growing in the South. Texas Agricultural and Mining University (Texas A & M) is one example of such a school. Eventually many such state colleges would evolve into state universities. Through it all, however, the 3 main educational questions remained important: what should students be taught; how should they be taught; and how much freedom should students have to study what they want? Sadly, however, almost no one was asking if even primary age students should be free to study what they want. Most everyone took it for granted they should be regimented to passively keep obeying their teachers and working on book-assignments? Because mostly conservative educators continued controlling their public schools, student freedom remained small and confined. After all, habits off obedience were useful to those controlling our corporations and military services; they made union organizing more difficult, as well as demanding a larger share of corporate profits.
Early in the 1800s, however, another famous American educator, Horace Mann (d. 1859) gained some fame as Boards of Education were growing in states. Mann became Massachusetts’s education leader and worked to make subjects more secular and useful in the schools, rather than merely religious; feudal religious habits were thus becoming less powerful with the growth of Mann’s ideas. He also began experimenting with what today are called ‘normal’ teacher colleges, where young folks are trained to be teachers. After all, the more educated they are about their art and students, the better prepared they are to teach useful skills and ideas. Also, around that time, so-called Transcendentalists like Bronson Alcott (d. 1888) began experimenting educationally. He was dedicated to equality, vegetarianism, and animal-rights, opening several short-lived schools himself. He too saw enjoyable work-play activities like singing, dancing, art, and music as the best and most natural way for young children to feel how much fun learning can be. Eventually his daughter Louisa May (d. 1888) would help get the family out of poverty with her popular writings, especially Little Women, and Little Men.
Then, after the Civil War, Dewey's liberal progressive school movement began growing stronger with help from men like Francis Parker (d. 1902), known to many as the father of US progressive education based on democratic equality for all. For example, he began getting some good learning results by experimenting with a less formal seat-row structured classroom the Grammar schools had been practicing for centuries. It too helped make learning more natural rather than book-centered. In fact, Parker worked with Dewey at the University of Chicago in the late 1890s, as Dewey began experimenting with his own famous Lab School. There he tested different ideas about what children can know, what they should learn, and how they should learn it. There he became firmly convinced an active intelligent experimental learning method was best.
After earning his BA at the University of Vermont, Dewey did some high school teaching in Oil City, Pennsylvania in 1881. There he saw for himself how unnatural and artificial the conservative educational book-centered model was, and how students quickly became bored with it, and causing discipline problems as well. Many students simply didn't need to know all the facts college education professors said they should know. What's more, the book-facts they were learning were separated from any kind of practical use, making divorcing learning from the feeling half of our body-mind. In such schools knowledge was thus merely intellectual, rather than given much feeling-depth.
Dewey certainly wasn't alone. Many newly freed African educators too were feeling the same kinds of results. Booker T. Washington (d. 1915) was one of them. With a dedicated group of Northern and local backers, he also included student work projects like helping build the school itself, almost from the ground up -- the Tuskegee Normal School. There, future African teachers like himself would be trained, but with more practical kinds of knowledge and skills. His progressive school emphasized practical work-related learning as well as academic class work. Students also learned intelligent kinds of health habits, like dental care; they were made to carry a toothbrush and keep their teeth clean on a daily basis; it was part of their practical character training. Even his own son would eventually become an expert brick-maker, helping build many of the institute’s buildings on an abandoned plantation wealthy northern white folks helped him buy. He also had help from supportive white Alabama legislators, trading their help for African votes at election time. His is indeed an inspiring educational story for anyone interested in progressive education models. Eventually Dewey became one of the movement’s most famous leaders. In the early 1900s he even traveled to China, Japan, and Turkey to make educational suggestions.
With his help progressive liberals began feeling another major weakness in conservative book-centered schools. As time went on and more public school systems were built, the all-important study of democratic habits and skills was almost completely ignored, except of course at some of the better private schools, to which wealthy folks normally sent their children. Thus most public schools continued ignoring the skills most useful in a democratic republic, like voting, and making their own neighborhoods more equal for everyone. In those kinds of conservative schools learning remained focused on merely memorizing more academic book-facts and test taking. In such schools democratic habits themselves remained weak. What’s more, students weren't formally taught the art of feeling how such facts and knowledge could be used to keep improving life both inside and outside of school. Thus most students remained passive and accepting – the main habits practiced by the masses for thousands of years. So again, the lack of constructive feelings made learning more mental than anything else. Building constructive and helpful social democratic character habits was generally ignored -- the most important part of any democratic learning experience! And on top of all that, such book-facts were quickly forgotten. How many people today remember how to solve a quadratic equation, or what such math knowledge can be used for, or remember the names of US presidents, or how to build community gardens or public parks?
In the early 1900s conservative and liberal educational models became more distinct and defined, thanks to Dewey’s work. More and more people wanted their schools to teach more progressive democratic and practical habits. More people demanded more political power to weaken conservative control, helping pass an amendment to elect senators directly. Also, more liberals began seeing how many of our serious social problems like crime and drug abuse were encouraged by keeping our conservative book-centered schools in place. Without teaching more useful democratic character habits, like how to enjoy respecting our just laws and other peoples’ equal rights, how to intelligently guide one’s own educational growth, and intelligently enjoy life itself, a conservative book-centered model kept helping produce many less than excellent social results.
Another weak result for conservative book-oriented schools was this: they encouraged young folks to keep depending on adults for what they learned, rather than build their own habits of independent and intelligent thinking. In other words, studying only what the teacher told them to study promoted a dependent we'll-take-care-of-you feeling in students, as they're given books, pencils, and even questions to answer. Thus dependence was encouraged, rather than independence and character development, thus encouraging a welfare state itself to evolve. How else was the great wealth of the upper class to be counterbalanced and checked unless they paid their fair share in taxes? Thus, the more dependent students became on teachers, the more they needed to rely on the government to make life better.
No doubt, Dewey wanted teachers involved in an educational process, but their role should be very different from merely handing out book assignments, grading tests, and giving grades. Such work in fact helps keep students overly dependent, passive, immature, and unintelligent. They were the habits produced for much of the medieval period, and for thousands of years before that. Instead, they should help children know how their own habits can become more intelligent, how they might improve their schools and neighborhoods, and also suggest intelligent ideas to help them build some plans to accomplish those goals. How else can the ultimate goal of excellent education itself, intelligent self-guidance, be best accomplished? Without such liberals schools they remain largely focused on finding the few students who have good memories, and pretty much neglect everyone else. In them our economic classes remain the status quo.
Based on such weak, unhealthful, and undemocratic results, Dewey felt completely justified in creating a more naturalistic, democratic, and progressive educational model, where schools helped students learn more about their own bodies and how to keep them healthy, learning what intelligent experimental learning feels like, and how to use in and out of school. For him, schools should have a number of constructive shops where students could learn how to keep intelligently building a better world, just like in the real world.
Moreover, with such schools useful academic facts wouldn't be ignored, but rather learned naturally with constructive projects, including math, science, literature, and history facts. For Dewey, tools like microscopes, telescopes, and computers were best used to help students learn how to keep improving themselves, their schools, and their communities. Learning to use ideas intelligently was the key to building excellent character habits as well, rather than depending on the government more than was necessary. Why shouldn’t students learn how to intelligently run a school democratically, allow some students to create businesses, elect a government to help regulate them for everyone’s good, and learn to judge their student representatives by their constructive and helpful actions? Isn’t that what adults do in the real world? It's a modern educational challenge still existing today, simply because conservatives still largely control what the next generation is learning in their schools. Without such progressively liberal democratic schools our nation continues seeing roughly half the population continue acting passively and acceptingly as political and economic control keep growing for a few wealthy folks; many seem addicted to making and keeping as much money as they can.
Are such weak and unhealthful democratic results really impossible to improve? Certainly not for Dewey. What he brought to the progressive education movement was the new Behaviorist psychology. All such human habits, including conservative greedy ones, are merely the result of practice. If students keep practicing more intelligent democratic habits, then they will grow stronger in time. Conservatives have known that fact for thousands of years, and have used religious ideas to convince people they are the eternal Truth and so should be accepted and supported. As the opening quotes show, even Aristotle knew children learn their habits actively, not just with reasoning, and should be taught religious habits as well. For liberal Dewey, however, different habits simply create different kinds of will power, and democratic habits are the best way to make life better for everyone, not just for a few.
The Russian Experiment
Dewey’s liberal educational model was already growing around the country when Russia’s 1917 revolution erupted. Naturally, as new schools were built there he was interested in what they were doing, and so about 10 years after the revolution he went there himself. No doubt, Communist Party members were eager to show him some of their more progressive schools. If he liked what he saw he might give them some good publicity. Naturally they allowed him to see only what they wanted him to see, and he did write some positive things about such schools; they were already growing in many parts of the US as well, like throughout the Gary, Indiana district. In some Russian schools he saw children regularly going out into their world to learn more about it, make natural collections, and also use their knowledge to make peoples’ lives better. After all, most everyone there was still an uneducated peasant. Helpful character excellence was thus encouraged in such schools. Of course they still existed on a very limited scale, but what he saw he often liked.
"... the ‘school of work’ was quite central in post-revolutionary school undertakings. And a main feature was that, while productive work is educative par excellence, it must be taken in a broad social sense, and as a means of creating a social new order and not simply as an accommodation to the existing (feudalistic) economic regime.
I can only pay my tribute to the liberating effect of active participation in social life upon the attitude of students. Those whom I met had a vitality and a kind of confidence in life; that afforded one of the more stimulating experiences of my life. …a boy of fourteen wrote upon the back of a painting he presented me; the picture was given in memory of the ‘school that opened my eyes.’ ...
The primary principle of method officially laid down is that, in every topic, work by pupils is to begin with observation of their own environment, natural and social. (The best museum of natural and social materials for pedagogical purposes I have ever seen is in a country district outside of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), constructed on the basis of a complete exhibit of local fauna, flora, mineralogy, etc, and local antiquities and history, made by pupils from excursions under the direction of their teacher.) ...
To them, an educative project(‘s) value is its contribution to some socially useful work. In general, they include contributions to improvement of sanitation and hygienic conditions, … assisting in the campaign against illiteracy; reading newspapers and books to the illiterate, helping in clubs, excursions … with younger children; assisting ignorant adults to understand the policies of local soviets so that they can take part in them intelligently; engaging in Communist propaganda, and, on the industrial side, taking some part in a multitude of diverse activities calculated to improve economic conditions. (Later Works, v. 3, 224-239; additions my own)
No doubt, with such thoughts many today would feel Dewey himself was really a communist, so why believe anything he said about conservative American schools? Of course he would like what he saw in Russia. But in fact, he was neither a Marxist nor a communist; he was a liberal democrat who supported Fabian socialism. For him, if enough people democratically wanted to experiment with progressive educational ideas, then it should go forward. Such experimentation was the life blood of making it easier for people to keep intelligently adjusting their habits in an always moving nature where wealthy folks have great advantages over others.
In short, the people should be free to experiment with any institution a majority want to experiment with, including their schools. For him, anywhere progressive schools produce a more healthful and intelligent public was to be celebrated, whether in Russia, China, Japan, Africa, or the US. After all, Gary’s progressive education system was already about 20 years old when Dewey went to Russia! What he objected to, however, were schools where young folks were trained not ask any questions, not try to improve either their schools or their neighborhoods, keep ignoring how the economic, political, and social status quo operates, and especially keep hateful racial actions in place. For Dewey, liberal progressive schools are better simply because of the more helpful democratic habit-arts they teach, whether in Russia or the US!
After Dewey’s Russian trip, however, schools there became more conservative, no doubt on Stalin's orders; he too had a liberal democratic opposition to wipe out, and also a rural nation to modernize, not to mention an aristocracy to eliminate. Thus more and more Russian schools reverted back to conservative Western methods of teacher and book-centered education. Students were made to feel the Communist Party already knew the eternal Truth and so there was no need for anyone to question anything about their studies. Thus learning once again became anchored mainly to finding students who were better at rote memorization of approved ideas and facts, as well as the uncritical and unimaginative obedience to their teachers. In effect, then, Russian schools became more Platonic, educating the next generation to merely accept the elite ruling Communist class. With such actions Hegel’s educational ideas lived. The all-important habits of personal intelligence and democratic character skills like equal rights were simply neglected; obedience was demanded to the official Communist ideology, minimizing dissent and convincing every one of its eternal and unchanging Truth! In effect, then, their schools too became merely a secular version of medieval religious schools. Indeed, monopolistic political, economic, and educational power seems to be at least as addictive as heroin; the more you have, the more you want. For liberal like Dewey, intelligent democratic habits were the best antidote to such psychic feudalistic poison.
Here, however, is another irony worthy of Socrates himself. In the 1800s Marx boasted capitalism bore the seeds of its own destruction; for him greedy capitalists would keep controlling the government, the economy, and the schools and thus keep getting wealthier while most everyone else was kept poor and ignorant. Eventually the workers would revolt and start building a more equal society. To him unregulated capitalism was feudalistic and selfish, rather than liberating and democratic. As both 20th century and recent history teaches us, such ideas have some truth in them.
So, where's the irony? Well, about ten years after the Russian Revolution in 1917, many schools returned to using conservative educational methods, the seeds of which came from Western culture. Students were given books to read while teachers kept looking for those few students with good memories. Eventually, however, in the late 1980s, its economy imploded for a number of reasons, education being one of them. The less the next generation is taught how to keep improving their world, the more unstable life becomes. Be careful of the seeds we plant; they may become poisonous plants.
Is Russian and US alcoholism yet another unhealthful result of conservative schools? Long cold boring Russian winters, and the new stresses of city life, like cramped housing, can be very depressing, especially if one doesn’t have enjoyably creative and constructive habits to practice. What else is one to do during 7-month long Arctic winters besides drink? Ignoring teaching young folks how to enjoy using their time constructively thus helps keep such weaknesses in place. Today we're seeing yet more self-destructive results of not teaching students about physical and mental health; there’s been an alarming increase in both child and adult obesity, and its destructive health results. Eating has become a way for many people to forget about their problems and take a nap instead.
More About Dewey's Liberal Education Model
Born in liberal Vermont, Dewey lived through the US Progressive Movement at the height of its power in the early 1900s. Beginning in the 1880s he didn't hesitate to question more and more of his conservative Christian and Hegelian ideas. Slowly, many of them he rejected as he saw an industrial world blossom around him, with all its poverty and labor problems. He also saw a liberal progressive democratic movement grow stronger. Much of the nation was reacting against the conservative feudalistic status quo; he even voted for Teddy Roosevelt in 1904, just after he began teaching at Columbia, in New York. There too he felt the dominant conservative education model simply made it easier for conservatives to keep their status quo in place.
What's more, in the early 1900s millions of poor and undereducated immigrants were flooding into the country and they needed to know how to intelligently experiment with their new democratic power; most of them had no such power in Europe. He knew only such democratic power could best keep transforming still-feudal conservative systems into a more democratic nation. And the movement’s great democratic achievements in the 1910s only added to his confidence about democracy itself, so why shouldn’t our public schools become more liberal and progressive? His important book Democracy and Education (1916) showed how more liberal schools could finally meet the on-going democratic challenge to keep teaching the next generation such important character habits and ideas like equal rights for all. Soon hundreds of schools around the country were experimenting with more liberal kinds of educational ideas.
Slowly, however, such schools gradually reverted to the old conservative book-centered model as first the Great Depression greatly reduced education money, and World War 2 kept that reality in place. Again, conservatives knew full well, their feudalistic systems just would not work the way they wanted if people learned democratic habits of equality and equal rights, and made the government keep regulating corporations for the public good. In the 1920s the chairman of General Electric said the government should let the economy run on its own. Such conservatives just didn’t want to imagine the much different world we'd have today if soldiers and workers demanded and got their democratic equal rights? Corporate CEOs, for example, just wouldn't be paid million dollar salaries while their workers were paid just enough to live on, and sometimes not even that!
No doubt, Dewey would agree both parents and those studying to be teachers shouldn’t just assume the next generation will be getting an excellent education merely because the schools look new and modern. Progressive parents and young teachers should get more involved in building more progressive schools; they should not only teach themselves what their kids are learning, but also how they're learning it! Are students learning important kinds of character habits like physical and mental health, and building them actively, or are they merely learning more and more academic facts? Are they merely learning habits of passive obedience, or are they also learning how to actively use their knowledge intelligently and experimentally in their schools and neighborhoods? If not, then why should parents, students, and young teachers merely accept a conservative education model? Democracy's health and strength, as well as personal health and growth, are best learned with much different kinds of learning projects? Talk as critically of democracy in the US as you please, and say all the ways its weak and unhealthful, but the fact remains: Only when enough people demand improvements, will both schools and governments become more democratic and liberally progressive. And the more that happens, the easier it becomes for more workers to demand more democratic decision-making power on their corporation’s board of directors, as well as demand a greater share of huge profits many of our corporations are making these days! In short, for Dewey there is an intimate and close organic relationship between education and peoples' general social lives. The one can make important improvements in all other systems.
To Dewey, another conservative educational weakness seemed obvious. Because no one can ever know all academic facts, and because we live in a continually changing world, a truly educated person learns the art of knowing HOW TO RAPIDLY FIND AND WISELY USE facts and information to solve both their own personal and social problems! To put it plainly, learning how to learn is much more important than merely learning a lot of academic facts. Thus, learning how best to learn is the most important skill we should be teaching young folks. Over 2 million years ago, from the first little stone toolmaker to this day, intelligently and actively learning new facts, and then using them kindly and thoughtfully is true liberal educational gold. So, the more students actively practice how to keep joyfully and constructively experimenting with their world, the less need they're have to keep numbing or hyping themselves up with drugs and stimulants, and the more life will be improved.
Needless to say, the evolution of such liberal democratic schools is still a great challenge for both parents, students, and young teachers. Such liberal models of education are barely over a hundred years old, while conservative systems have been in place for centuries, and have become even more dominant in the US during the last 40 years. The wealthy have become much wealthier and so have even more power to support conservative politicians who mostly want teacher unions broken up by building a second kind of school system, called Charter schools. It’s ok to break the public school monopoly, but it’s certainly not ok to break up economic or political monopolies.
In Dewey's liberal educational model, character habits again are elevated to the importance they had for many educators down through history; the main different between him and them is the democratic and healthful nature of those habits. Together with actively experimenting with useful knowledge and skills, healthy democratic character habits make up his 3-fold liberal educational foundation. In general it’s learning skills like how to respect all law-abiding people, and work for their equal rights. Our world still has millions of people believing only their own personal or religious habits are eternal and unchanging Truth, and so feel justified in even forcing others to obey or drive them away. For example, those conservatives who are against giving women the freedom to control their own bodies continue passing more and more restrictive laws against abortion. Thus, the clash of liberal and conservative habits continues on, sometimes violently, and so public education remains the best way to keep building a more democratic world. A few decades ago, a conservative southern governor said it like this: Racial segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever. Such conservative undemocratic feelings and ideas are often promoted in our own conservative schools; again, for us liberals they are merely habits, not eternal truth. When all people are seen merely as people, such feelings begin weakening.
Obviously, Dewey had faith in democracy and education as the most intelligent means for ending any feudalistic monopoly; violence wastes both life and money. For example, before the US entered World War 1, New Yorkers got a chance to vote such schools into their city system, where students were allowed to learn more practical kinds of work habits, like carpentry and electrical skills. Such schools would make it easier for students to find work after they graduated, and also make their book-work more meaningful and creative. So, the issue was put to a vote. During the campaign such progressive ideas were encouraged by William Wirt, the progressive Superintendent of the Gary, Indiana school system; he claimed such schools had actually saved taxpayers money, so many people listened.
Eventually, however, it was voted down; many immigrants simply felt their children just wouldn’t learn enough factual knowledge to get into universities and become doctors and lawyers. Today, however, social results like high drop-out rates, law-breaking, unemployment, and the high cost of prison maintenance are once again building the argument for more progressive kinds of schools, where character habits, as well as useful knowledge and skills, are learned with active kinds of constructive projects. In short, today's conservative book-centered schools continue failing to pass many practical tests of social excellence, like meeting student needs for learning more practical job skills.
That New York vote was just one election, and in many districts around the country people wanted more progressive schools built. Many other cities around the nation, like the steel town at Gary, gladly used Dewey’s practical education model for years. How can young folks be expected to get good jobs after high school when they haven't been taught how to work intelligently in their public schools? In fact, in a 1975 report by historian Ronald Cohen about the Gary schools he mentions an interesting fact. "By 1929 over 200 cities in 41 states had adopted (Dewey's educational ideas) in part or in whole, and few other communities remained totally unaffected by its innovations." That was probably the height of the progressive education movement. The Great Depression almost completely crippled many progressive school reform movements; while 25% of workers became unemployed, and lost their homes and savings, many wealthy folks continued getting wealthier.
At Gary many Africans at first weren’t convinced such schools were best. Because there wasn't enough adult education about such schools, the community there was divided over the idea. Even Dewey's old conservative nemesis, John Rockefeller's foundation, criticized Gary's Schools in a 1918 report, and so that experiment continued being looked at all through the 1920s to see its all-important results. On the whole, however, the progressive school movement was a very positive experience for many students who no doubt would have been much less prepared for life after graduation. With good work and business skills it became easier to get and hold jobs in the steel industry, helping reduce the need for government assistance and violent revolution; no doubt the Russian revolution had made many US conservatives jittery, including J. P. Morgan.
However, despite all its accomplishments at the time, progressive education just wasn’t able to solve one major social problem, racial hatred and segregation. Progressive schools in the South were few and far between, and it certainly wasn't just a southern weakness; it remained an ongoing national problem during all of Superintendent Wirt's term of office (1907-1938). During World War 2 the government helped out and began integrating the armed forces, and in 1954 a much more liberal Supreme Court stepped in to help. Its Brown v. Board of Education ruling finally said 'separate but equal' Jim Crow schools for whites and Africans was inherently racially unequal and thus unconstitutional! It was a big boost to our liberal democratic ideals of equal rights and opportunities, and lessened the talk of revolution heard so much during the 1930's Great Depression.
More liberal drug policies too were difficult to improve; no doubt, many conservatives used them to keep their jails full and reduce economic opportunities. Also, many supposedly respectable bankers were getting richer laundering drug money as well as helping outlaw many harmless drugs. As the late liberal Gore Vidal reminded us, since Prohibition in the 1920s, illegal drugs had created powerful criminal gangs, helped terrorize peaceful and law-abiding people, turned many of our banks into money-laundering sites, and greased many political pockets! Such results are yet more reasons why conservative book-centered schools can be seen as teaching habits much less than democratic excellence. How many students have graduated from such schools feeling learning itself was anything but fun and enjoyable?
Have Any Questions?
The conservative learning model also helped weaken a question-asking habit-art, and thus weaken curiosity itself. When a teacher prepares a lesson, including the questions to be answered, then what need is there to ask more questions? In real life, however, one of the most important habit-arts is intelligent question-asking! It can easily launch a new learning adventure. For many conservatives, however, such habit-arts are often seen as a real threat and danger to their power! After all, the more students are encouraged to question what's going on in their classrooms, and in the real world, the more they might ask how could we build a better world? Certainly, in times of war or economic recessions, such questioning could even weaken the status quo.
Progressive teachers thus encourage student questions and creative student answers as well, especially about what they're interested in and what they want to improve, both in themselves and their neighborhoods! Such student interest is needed to make learning much more than just another dull and boring book assignment. And to make such habits easier to practice, progressive teachers also allow students to work in smaller groups than the normal 30-40 class size. Such groups can more easily promote student talking and thinking, and thus help improve their monastery-like schools. Indeed, how can student curiosity keep growing when, for the most part, they're simply given their assignments by the teacher – book, paper, and pencil -- and when, in effect, they're treated like infants, rather than as growing individuals with real thinking and analyzing powers?
So What Happened?
You may now be wondering why didn't such progressive democratic schools keep growing? A major reason has to do with conservative philosophy itself; above all else the status quo should be preserved! In short, conservatives feel preserving old ideas and habits should be preserved just because they are old ideas and habits! Such habits feel comfortable and so should continue on.
Then, perhaps the second most important reason in the last 60 years was Russia's 1957 Sputnik satellite launch. It literally shocked the entire world! Conservative Republicans thus needed a scape goat, or else liberals would start blaming the Republicans. Quickly they decided to blame it on Dewey's progressive education ideas! President Eisenhower himself mentioned Dewey by name, and said his educational model was to blame; it largely ignored math and science studies, and thus helped weakened our space program! With such tactics and millions now afraid of communists being everywhere, conservative educators and politicians saw yet another opportunity to end progressive education's popularity. It was to blame for Russia's beating us into space! Such ideas were useful for educating the public about communist dangers, so it fit nicely into their anti-Communist Cold War programs. And when Russia began building huge numbers of H-bombs and putting them on missiles, it helped more people believe our schools needed to become more conservative by teaching everyone more math and science facts. That was the general idea when I was in high school in the 1960s. Many people were so afraid of communists they even built backyard bomb shelters. No doubt, such feelings were useful to all those being paid with tax dollars to keep building more H-bombs!
Thus, progressive education in general became another scapegoat for our own weak space program; it also justified feeding the military-industrial complex with tax supported billions. Instead of using rockets to launch useful satellites, the political system was forced to keep building more atomic warheads on rockets. With the Cold War arms race huge amounts of taxpayer money was spent building up our own nuclear arsenal, while not enough people bothered to demand politicians step forward and begin building cooperative systems, like we have with China and Vietnam today! Besides, merely one H-bomb can destroy an entire city, and both governments were building thousands of them?!
So, scapegoating progressive education in general, and even Dewey himself in particular, became fashionable in the 1950s and ‘60s. Not enough liberals stepped up and said such thinking was about as accurate as saying the moon was made of cheese. After all, already frightened people often believed anything merely because some political leader said it; for them merely simple statements create truthful feelings. And of course many liberals had become part of the system, and were afraid to put their own careers at risk; those who criticized conservative ideas often lost their jobs, even in liberal-oriented Hollywood.
In fact, however, such liberal scapegoating was ridiculous. Dewey based his entire educational philosophy on teaching students to intelligently use scientific facts to keep improving not only their own habits, but their schools and neighborhoods! He simply wanted all schools teaching students how to build and live in a less military-dominated world, where hundreds of millions of people would be endangered. To him experimental testing and its useful facts were crucially important for that goal, but Sputnik gave conservative politicians and educators a convenient scapegoat to avoid criticism of their own government and military spending; once again, liberals were blamed for the nation's space troubles. To this day, some 60 years later, many conservative politicians keep playing the blame-game while passing bills aimed at making our nation even more feudalistic than ever. Recently a number of people leaked information showing how much our government has been spying on almost everyone, and recording who they call and when. Even some liberals say it’s all in the name of national security, even though it hasn’t stopped terrorist attacks completely.
Finally, yet another reason for progressive education’s shrinkage was runaway experimentation within the movement. The movement began losing its main educational mission as it spawned a great variety of different experiments, like, for example, Summerhill-type schools. In them students were free to study whatever they wanted, and even not study at all. For Dewey that was the prescription for educational anarchy, not building intelligent habits; such schools took student freedom too far. For him it was best to teach students the art of experimental intelligence, rather than experimental anarchy. Sooner or later, students need to know how to intelligently make a living and work a job, so why not teach them such skills in our public schools, instead of merely allowing them to do whatever they wanted, or merely reading more books? In Section 35 we'll take a look at another recent educational experiment, so-called Charter schools, and in the next section see some more social reasons for building progressive liberal schools.
5. LIBERAL EDUCATION’S SCIENTIFIC ROOTS
Modern Science Created New Educational Needs
In this section we continue looking at more of the most important social factors helping create the need for more liberal progressive schools. In the last section we saw how religious Reformation, the Renaissance, and exploration continued weakening feudal otherworldly habits and fears of the natural world. In this section we’ll look briefly at an important 4th social movement, no doubt even more powerful than those other 3: the scientific revolution. For us Deweyan liberals its new intelligently active experimental learning method cannot be overemphasized in education, even at the primary level, and of course in daily life as well. In fact, the tremendous growth of knowledge caused by it in the last 4 centuries is now calling for radically different answers to education's 2 most important questions: what facts, skills, and character habits should students be taught, and how should they be taught them?
Because of the scientific revolution, it's simply no longer possible for anyone to know all the facts there are, and so the conservative book-centered model of teaching only facts and skills can now be seriously questioned and challenged by liberals today. In short, the conservative learning model is no longer educationally excellent in a democratic society. And what’s more, who should pick the facts students are made to learn? Should it be university educators, high school educators, or students and parents themselves?
As we’ve seen already, we democratic Deweyan liberals say what's needed these days is 3 new additions to our schools:
1. Allow students a greater freedom to more the facts, skills, and character habits they want to learn about;
2. Learn how to intelligently learn them with experimental testing;
3. And also how to use their ideas to help keep people and their neighborhoods safe and also improving.
Thus, science’s experimental learning habit-art should now replace the old conservative learning method of merely reading more and more facts assigned by the teacher. Among other weak results, that conservative learning model keeps creative and curious habit-arts, instincts, and impulses weak and unhealthful. For us it makes life in an always changing world more difficult and stressful. The more students feel what intelligent experimental learning is, and how they can use it to learn whatever they want to learn, the more intelligent people become. With that new learning method at the core of liberal schools, both research and character habits become much easier to teach and learn as well.
As Dewey observed, in the blink of an eye span of about a hundred years, from 1800 to 1900, educational excellence went from merely memorizing more and more textbook facts to knowing HOW to intelligently use our reliable and dependable scientific facts, for both personal and social improvement! In other words, feeling more personal and social weaknesses, WHERE to find information about stronger ones, building an intelligent plan to learn them, and then actively testing it, has become a much more intelligent definition of learning excellence than merely memorizing what Shakespeare, Newton, or even Einstein said. And if that’s true, then taxpayers themselves are now being challenged as never before to start building such schools in their own neighborhoods, rather than merely another conservative public or Charter school. That’s the new democratic challenge for people. Until enough people focus their progressive energies on building such schools, then we'll continue seeing many of the social problems plaguing us today, like excessive greed, unhealthful eating habits, increasing environmental dangers, and a political system often offering its services to the highest bidder.
For us liberals, in many ways our conservative, anti-experimental schools continue being our own worst social enemies. After all, what’s the good of having a head full of academic language, historical, or even scientific facts and yet not know how to use them intelligently on the job or at home? What’s the good of knowing such facts and still not being able to walk safely home after school, or even getting shot at while playing safely in one’s own yard? And so again, the art of intelligently using facts experimentally to solve real world challenges has become the new liberal educational model of excellence! In some neighborhoods, for example, it’s much more intelligent to know how to stop drug dealers from spreading their poisons, rather than learning more history and math facts!
Such knowledge about how to practice experimental intelligence will stay weak and unhealthful until taxpayers demand their politicians make their schools more liberal and progressive. The freedom to actively practice experimental intelligence is at the core of such schools. The aim is to liberal children from conservative schools in which students are made to follow orders and learn what they’re told to learn. Great fortunes have been made already with the help of such obedient and passive people. With such experimental freedom, students will become better at even judging our laws by looking at their actual results, and even working to change those undemocratic ones. It also might become more difficult to pass, say, unenlightened drug laws. After all, like alcoholism, greed, or obsessive gambling, drug use too is a sickness, rather than a crime. It even might become easier to actually start building more public banks around the country, so they can become better at working for the public good, rather than addictively increasing the wealth of a few.
In fact, conservatives have known about experimentation’s powers for centuries, and have used it to keep conservative schools working. In them important character habits are formally ignored, like learning how to enjoyably build and practice useful skills. Thus, they’ve helped keep society divided along class lines. So, until addicts can get drugs legally while learning how to enjoy life without them, then violent drug gangs will continue menacing innocent people in our cities and states, as well as corrupting greedy bankers, politicians, and police. Such results are now being seen by liberals as more reasons to keep challenging our conservative schools, even at the primary grade level! The sooner young students begin feeling how enjoyable intelligent experimental learning can be, the less need there'll be for using drugs to make life pleasurable and rewarding.
To say the very least, educational excellence has, with science's experimental learning art and Dewey's help, undergone a major reconstruction. Based on that learning method, we say in many ways it’s educationally unhealthful to keep making all students memorize facts they will almost certainly never use outside of school. What drug dealer will stop dealing when they’re told about how 2 mixed numbers can be added together? And another thing, such schools help keep important individual habits of curiosity weak, thus reducing the instinct to keep learning all through life.
Some More Educational History
Such liberal ideas can be stated even more forcefully. Not teaching the next generation intelligent experimental habits of learning has helped keep people on primitive and feudalistic levels of existence for millions of years! During the last 2 million years our primitive ancestors had almost no tools to keep learning how to make life less dangerous and safer. As a result, they began experimenting with spirit-ideas to overcome life's fearful feelings, like of death and disease. Even after the agricultural revolution started about 10,000 years ago, when people began settling down into villages and towns, there was little organized experimental testing and research. Thus both technology and democracy grew at a snail’s pace. Accepting a feudalistic social system run from the top down was the best habit to learn, thus making it easier to eventually accept conservative and moderate Platonic and Aristotelian models of nature in ancient Greece. For both of them there existed eternal and unchanging Truth, educated people should learn about it, and thus keep control over others less educated. If atheists and agnostics wouldn’t change their ideas, then Plato said they should be killed. Until only recently, as intelligent experimental testing became our strongest learning art, have such conservative actions become weaker. Today many conservatives feel the same way about gay and lesbian habits. In short, only recently, with experimental learning, has the conservative model of nature itself been replaced, including many religious ideas of absolute Truth. As a result, knowing such facts have become less important. For much of history educational excellence depended more on a sturdy genetic makeup, a powerful family, or a brutal disposition.
For most of civilized life our ancestors lacked the tremendously powerful learning tool of intelligent experimentation. Young folks learned the skills of their family, including kings and queens. As a result, most everyone learned the local conservative religious and magical rituals thought to make life less dangerous, more satisfying, and more healthful; many Bible pages discuss diet habits. Thus, without intelligent experimentation almost everyone was taught to passively accept a much lower standard of living and a closed feudalistic social, economic, religious, and political status quo. Needless to say, democratic choice was also kept to an absolute minimum!
However, with the growth of intelligent experimentation, it became much easier for people to reject passively following someone else’s orders, even teachers themselves. Any idea could be questioned if it produced dangerous and harmful results. Thus, more people began experimenting for themselves, on their own, to solve both personal and social challenges. Unfortunately, however, in many of our conservative schools today, such an active and intelligent learning art is still not taught on a formal level. The great power of creatively intelligent experimental learning still hasn't been institutionalized on a very wide scale. How many students took chemistry and physics classes in high school and never once heard a teacher say what exactly is meant by intelligent experimental learning, why it's our strongest learning art, and how it can be used in our daily lives?
As a result, we are still seeing large numbers of high school dropouts beginning their adult years with absolutely no idea about how best to teach themselves what they want to learn. High student unemployment rates are the natural result, as is more crime and lawlessness. And worst of all, we still see the clash between democratic progressives who believe in equal rights for all law-abiding citizens, and wealthy conservatives who believe they must keep using their money to keep increasing their feudalistic money power. Many even convince themselves they’re somehow more deserving and worthy of wealth than most everyone else! How many times have you seen conservative TV ads paid for by wealthy corporations preaching no government regulations? They know people will accept such ideas if they’re told them enough times, just like their teachers told them what books to read and what to believe.
In short, the educational challenge for us liberal Deweyans today remains as important as it was in the early 1900s, perhaps even more so. Conservative corporations have continued increasing their social, political, economic, and educational power to obscene and stifling levels, especially in the last 40 years, all done with more intelligent experimentation. As a result, most people have absolutely no feeling for experimentally testing ideas for their reliability; in some places teaching that very important habit-art to the next generation has become as challenging as teaching evolution itself! It's still a relatively new idea of Dewey's to make intelligent experimentation the basis for a liberal educational model. With it he wanted to take conservative education to a new, more democratic level, allowing students the freedom to choose their subjects and learn them experimentally, to keep improving both their own habits and neighborhoods. So, obviously, only as more people begin demanding classes in Constructive and Intelligent Experimental Learning, and actively used that art constructively, will they begin reaching a new educational level. There simply is no better way to ensure democracy's future than making intelligent experimentation the core of a liberal learning model. If not, conservatives will continue making our world fit for only conservative values and ideas, as perverse as some of them are.
Character Excellence
With intelligent experimental learning, the very useful art of personal improvement becomes just as important as learning reliable facts and skills. Only active practice with such habit-arts best helps their growth. Any weak, excessive, and unhealthful habit-art can be improved with experimental testing, even drug addiction and greed! With, say, active kinds of experimental role-playing, important character habits like truth-telling and helpfulness best start growing even in primary age students. With such active experimental role playing young folks best begin feeling what it's like to start intelligently guiding their own character excellence! With more student freedom, more students can start actively experimenting with such character habits after hearing more about what habits a healthy adult builds. Thus it’ll become easier to compare their own habits with more excellent ones, and also how to actively begin learning them experimentally. And when they also begin feeling HOW enjoyable intelligent experimentation can be, then the child become emotionally involved with the learning process, rather than being forced to learn what it doesn't want to learn. Where is it written school must be enslaving, boring, and dull? Many, if not most, students have those feelings year after year.
To be sure, Dewey wasn't a Marxist; he didn't believe such liberal experimental schools would be inevitable, or they could only grow after a violent revolution. No. Once again, the most intelligent way for them to evolve is with people intelligently experimenting in their own neighborhood schools! Such liberal schools can certainly happen if enough parents, teachers, and students demand an end to the conservative book-centered model of educational excellence, and begin replacing it one year at a time with a more liberal democratic experimental model, based on students actively practicing and using the ideas they learn. In that kind of liberal model, politicians will no longer be able to act with feudalistic educational power, as is still the case in Chicago and New York, but rather share equally educational decision-making between businesspeople, teachers, taxpayers and students! Only when focused and concentrated people power demand such schools will they best start becoming more of a reality with experimental learning.
6. THE BASIC CONSERVATIVE EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE
Many of our current conservative challenges can be traced back to what’s become known as The Powell Memo, or Manifesto. It was written in early summer of 1971, while widespread protests were going on across the nation on many college campuses in reaction to the obscenely brutal, deadly, and prolonged Vietnam War. While many minority young folks and Vietnamese were being needlessly killed and maimed for life, and many corporations were gladly making billions in taxpayer money to keep the killing going, DC lawyer Lewis Powell felt the entire capitalist system was being attacked by those who wanted to completely destroy it. There seemed to be only that so-called black/white situation, where protestors and critics had no real justification, and were completely divorced from that atrocious foreign policy. To us liberals, Vietnam was one of the worst foreign policy events in American history, if not the worst, and yet Powell, a future Supreme Court Justice, writes as if liberals had no real justification for condemning a system where large corporations were making huge taxpayer profits from the death of over 50,000 Americans and many times that many Vietnamese killed and maimed!
As liberals look at the memo today, available at reclaimdemocracy.org, it’s a rather cautious and moderate statement, especially when compared to more radical conservative sentiments today. Many want the government to give the business sector all the power it wants to do whatever it wants whenever it wants, and also make taxpayers pay for all their reckless and risky actions! For many conservatives, whatever the business sector does is really no one’s business, and it should stay that way. Powell wasn’t quite as radical, but his memo fired another opening shot at anyone he felt had no real justification for criticizing the economic system at all! To him what he called the enterprise system was under irrational attack and it must respond or it would be completely wiped out. If so, then it’s the statement of one more or less divorced from reality!
Powell wants conservatives to work more vigorously to overcome liberal criticism on a number of different fronts, like TV, newspapers, movies, government, and especially on college and even high school campuses. He writes: “… there is reason to believe … the campus is the single most dynamic source (of criticism and) … unsympathetic to the enterprise system. … Social science faculties … tend to be liberally oriented, even when leftists are not present.” He quotes another conservative writer: “Yale, like every other major college, is graduating scores of bright young men … who despise the American political and economic system.” (additions are my own) It’s as if no one has a right to protest being sent to die in a country posing absolutely no threat to the US! In short, obey the government, whether it’s right or wrong! Upon such feelings feudalistic social systems existed for many thousands of years.
So, what did he recommend? Well, he says the Chamber of Commerce should have “a staff of highly qualified scholars … who do believe in the system. … (they) should evaluate social science textbooks, especially in economics, political science, and sociology. This should be a continuing program. … should insist on equal speaking time on the college circuit. … urge the need for faculty balance upon university administrators and boards of trustees. … (become friendlier with) graduate schools of business … (and) request specific courses in such schools dealing with the entire scope of the problem addressed by this memorandum.”
Considering how much more radical the business sector has acted since 1971, it’s clear Powell’s memo was rather moderate and restrained. Today, our huge corporations have continued attacking organized labor, shipped jobs and profits overseas, often paying no taxes, continue accumulating hundreds of billions of dollars in their vaults, and in some cases get even more taxpayer rebate money. But it does show how some conservatives were thinking and focusing mainly on making more money, rather than increasing the public good. For many conservatives today, just about any government program giving people more control of their lives, and increasing the public good, is socialistic and therefore bad, if not evil.
More Recent Educational Challenges
More can be said about current conservative educational challenges. For example, the last Republican president, George W. Bush, signed an education bill called No Child Left Behind (NCLB) into law. However, if nothing else, the fine-sounding law (aren't they all fine-sounding?) can be honestly described by liberals everywhere as merely another example of conservative educational hypocrisy on a federal level! In it one set of abstract book-facts is used to control and dominate nearly all student-learning across the nation, whether they need to know such facts or not. To us liberals that model runs, if nothing else, completely against a democratic value of free choice, self-determination, and equal rights! Just like slaves in the antebellum South, by law neither students nor teachers have any choice about the subject matter to be learned. If they want to keep working and earn a diploma, then students must keep learning the abstract ideas others think they should learn. It's either that or drop-out. Case closed! And of course teachers must keep teaching such facts, or else risk losing their job.
To us liberal Deweyans, that educational model is simply anti-democratic! To us it's really another form of educational slavery for both teachers and students, practiced already for thousands of years! Teachers are now required by law to teach a certain number of facts, and only those facts. No doubt, if students choose to learn such facts, then they should be free to do so, but to make most all students learn them isn't educational democracy, it's educational enslavement. The opening quotes show even ancient conservative Plato was very against that learning model.
What’s more, it can be seen as yet another piece of conservative hypocrisy and irony worthy of Socrates himself. For centuries now conservatives have keep talking about reducing and eliminating government regulation and control throughout society, especially in the business sector. The smaller the government is, the better they like it. With NCLB, however, such talk about government control isn’t mentioned! Today, conservatives like Mr. Bush as well as his education-minded younger brother Jeb, see absolutely nothing wrong in regulating the entire education sector with federal law! If that isn't the height of philosophic hypocrisy, then what would be? Clearly, they too see the obvious power in education: the more the next generation is taught to obey their social superiors, and study only what they’re told to study, the easier it becomes for our huge corporations and military to keep their power intact, and thus maintain the feudalistic economic and military status quo! We Deweyan liberals don’t mean to destroy the capitalistic system, but merely to make it more democratic and thus more people-friendly.
On top of all that, we liberals say the federal NCLB law defines educational excellence in a very narrow and shallow way; it rewards students and teachers who passively are made to accept such a feudalistic, abstract, and academic learning model. That's some of its bad news. The good news is there are, already, some healthy signs of reaction against it. For example, recently Chicago teachers have experimented with a strike protest against just such an artificial definition of education, and especially basing teacher evaluations mainly on standardized test results. No doubt, in the future we'll see many more such protests.
Obviously, one lesson should be clear to all liberals. In many fundamental ways today conservatives take their education model very seriously, just as they take their no-government-regulation economic model very seriously, even when they openly contradict each other! Thus, if we liberals are to intelligently keep meeting such anti-democratic challenges, then we too must start experimenting with some more constructive and intelligent educational models. Only they can our schools begin teaching the next generation what the democratic value of freedom and equal rights feels like; only such schools and homes can best build more democratic, experimental, constructive, and excellent character habits.
Another important point can be made. Defining education so narrowly and uniformly as NCLB does, in effect openly discriminates against many inner city and poor minority students. How? Well, many poor students often have not been encouraged to build the same language and book-loving skills as many wealthy white students; their parents can easily afford expensive pre-schools. Hence, from the beginning, many lower class students start school without the same desire and ability to merely keep reading more and more books, and learning more abstract facts. As a result, schools becomes and remains boring, and we continue seeing very high drop-out rates in many of those social groups and schools, and even at the college level, where learning more such facts is demanded. Sadly, as statistics tell us, over 50% of college students never graduate!
As a result of such book-poor homes, all too soon many young folks come to feel they're not really smart enough to get a good education. Such feelings are tremendously important for lessening one's options in life. And the more that happens, the less they learn how to intelligently contribute to their own good as well as the publics.
What's more, how many people in the real world want to pay young folks to tell them about US History, geometry, English literature, and any other abstract facts? So again, in conservative schools their economic options become very limited. To us Deweyans, it's yet another result of maintaining a conservative educational model.
Again, the good news is this: it doesn't have to be that way! When they’re organized, people have the power to start improving such conservative schools and making them more actively experimental, rather than merely intellectual. All such conservative book-oriented schools can be greatly improved when parents, teachers, and students use intelligent experimentation. A noted Hindu religious leader, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, once said, I want everyone to be free. Many may feel that's an admirable feeling; who wouldn’t like to be free to do what they want? But we Deweyan liberals say freedom is always a growing affair; there never is a final state of freedom; life is always a process of becoming more or less free. In short, in an ever changing world no one can ever achieve a final state of perfect freedom. And so we liberals offer another 'final' educational goal: we want everyone to learn how to act intelligently, and that is always a function of intelligently using experimental learning and testing, for one's own good and the public good!
No doubt, many teachers are complying with the conservative NCLB law as best they can; they enjoy working with young folks and helping them learn about life. But the more experimental learning is ignored, the more schools are likely to become places where bazaar theatrical actions take place. For example, a recent Mother Jones article told about a principal telling students he's eat live worms if his students scored well on the yearly standardized tests! To us Deweyan liberals such actions are yet another example of the absurd results often produced in conservative schools, where learning itself is reduced to merely memorizing more and more book facts. Even more disturbing are the many reports of teachers openly cheating on tests by changing wrong student answers to right ones!
At the beginning of each school year many teachers usually give what’re called diagnostic tests to students, to see what they know, like a sheet of math problems. Well and good, but then NCLB says they must keep teaching students more abstract calculating skills they haven't learned yet, as if such work had some real use in the world outside the classroom. Students quickly learn that’s not the case. As a result, instead of teaching students how to experiment intelligently with what they're interested in, conservative school teachers often play a game called I'm-the-teacher-so-guess-the-right-answer-I-have! Psychologists call it operant conditioning. When students don't guess the right answer, then they don't get rewarded, and are sometimes even ridiculed.
Isn't it time more people began asking more intelligent questions about the conservative schools their taxes help pay for? After all, what is the sense of making all students learn about, say, RNA and DNA when they'll almost certainly never use such abstract ideas outside the classroom? No doubt, access to such knowledge should be available to all students; all classrooms should be wired with hi-speed broadband internet connections, so students can easily research answers to their questions. But why make all students slavishly learn facts they're not interested in? In the conservative NCLB educational model it’s as if both personal and social student needs should be ignored.
Who, then, can't see why many students, far too many students, begin feeling schoolwork is all but useless in their daily lives? Shouldn't such widespread feelings be a sign to start building more liberal schools, where they can more actively learn in school about healthy and excellent character habits, useful outside the classroom and all during their lives? As we'll see in sections 14-19, there are many different ways such knowledge can be used. As we saw in the last section, even those beginning to read can help illiterate adults learn more about the art.
As we’ve already seen, such conservative undemocratic schools are simply a holdover from medieval times, when religious leaders wanted to keep control of as many people as possible. Thus they taught the same religious ideas to all students. Such schools, however, continue ignoring how intelligent experimentation can help students start building some really useful habits, like good business skills. After all, when did people outside the monastery ever need to chant and pray for 8 hours a day, like monks and nuns did inside the monastery, and when do children today talk about RNA and DNA, or quadratic equations outside school? Even nurses and doctors rarely use such abstract ideas on the job; they too were kept subservient and passive in conservative schools. In fact, today many of our huge corporations and military want to have the same kinds of obedient and unquestioning young folks working for them; they even pass laws against those daring to reveal what they’re doing. Recently, even the few young folks who dared leak information about the spying actions of some of those organizations are quickly branded traitors and sometimes even jailed for years, just for telling the public what their taxes are being used for! Is that the kind of democracy we want, where taxpayers continue being milked for their money? One spying company is given over $5 billion of taxpayer money a year! Many conservatives even want to privatize Social Security, so they'll get to play more with retirement billions! I’m hoping now more people are becoming more aware of such on-going conservative challenges.
Thanks to the conservative NCLB education law, children are made to feel they need to know some arithmetic facts, and then some algebraic and geometric facts as well. Even more abstract math is often made available. And perhaps the worst result of all is this: after students get out of school and into the real world, they soon discover they almost never need to use any of the abstract facts they learned in school, like algebra and geometry. And the more that's true, the more people realize education is really nothing more than another racket; for the most past it’s felt to be just another waste of student time and taxpayer money! And because most people still don’t know what intelligent experimentation feels like, they feel trapped in a system they didn’t build and don’t want. Thus frustrating energies continue mounting. In fact, the widespread use of calculators in the business world has even reduced the need to memorize arithmetic facts; calculators are much better at reducing errors!
The common conservative justification for such abstract studies often rests on teaching children to think abstractly and reason logically. However, as we’ll see in a later section, that so-called faculty model of psychology has been discredited now for about 100 years, even though it went back to Plato and Aristotle themselves. For us liberal Deweyans there's now real objective evidence proving children learn to reason logically whatever they study intelligently, even if it's how to build a cabinet or better diet habits.
What then is the liberal alternative? In general, you might say what we Deweyan liberals are suggesting is making schools more like miniature cities, where people normally experiment with different skills and ideas on a daily basis, and meet together mainly to plan out the day’s work. How many people keep experimenting in the restaurant business all their lives? In such liberal schools, then, students will become freer to experimental with what seems most interesting to them, while teachers help them begin feeling what intelligent experimentation is like. As a result, many traditional discipline problems created by boredom will become less frequent; children will be more emotionally engaged with their work. No doubt personal problems will still exist, but again, learning to solve them with intelligent experimentation will become another useful skill learned; the art is often called conflict resolution. Or would we rather keep seeing young folks killing each other with guns? Even though today schools may be more colorfully decorated, and have more computers, students still need to know how to work intelligently, so they can use that learning skill all through their lives. The more they learn how to practice constructive intelligence in their schools, the easier it'll be to practice that art when they're on their own.
Perhaps the worst social result of conservative schools is this: Recent drop-out stats show us our schools are becoming irrelevant to a large and growing number of young folks, especially in our urban cities. What’s more, more and more of our public taxes are going to help wealthier schools better educate wealthier students. (see Rebecca Strauss, NY Times, 6-17-2013) As a result, only around 30% of students even go on to college, and a much smaller percent get a 4 year degree! If so, then isn’t that reason enough to start experimenting with more liberal kinds of educational models, especially at the primary, middle, and high school levels, and especially in our urban schools? Yes, such educational experimentation may be messy and noisy at first, and both teachers and students may become frustrated while learning what works best for students, but as religious leaders discovered thousands of years ago, the best way to build any new kind of school is with a small baby-step method, changing one grade at a time. We'll see more about that method in the sections entitled Why Not Reality Schools.
Here's another question taxpayers might want to start asking themselves about their conservative schools: Why should they keep paying for schools making students feel frustrated, bored, and also unprepared to contribute constructively after they graduate from high school? Some 70% of students don't go on to college! Why allow those students to feel they've been educationally ‘had,’ as it were, by their own neighborhood schools, feel they're not prepared for real world work, and perhaps even feel like they’re intellectually stupid simply because they don't want or need to know all the abstract ideas our conservative schools say they should know? Doesn't that sound like, say, punishing a dog or cat for not needing to be a vegetarian, or trying to intimidate heterosexuals, bisexuals, or homosexuals into believing their habits are somehow evil, deranged, and they should learn different ones? For us liberal Deweyans that is certainly not practicing a democratic feeling, where everyone, including prisoners, is an individual with different needs and wants. It seems as if our own slave-like feudalistic schools are, in fact, still disrespectful to one's natural democratic rights of choice and respect. If we don’t give children and parents that freedom, then how can we possibly expect them to give others that freedom when they’re adults? Without such freedom of choice it’s simply more difficult to keep building a healthy and vibrant political, economic, and educational democracy.
Am I being too harsh? Am I? The conservative NCLB law makes a conservative model the law of the land! So, in our cities and towns today such a feudal educational system exists, where the freedom to learn what’s most interesting is not an option. In Chicago, where I went to school, the mayor merely appointed the School Superintendent, thus taking peoples’ democratic educational power from those whose taxes paid for the schools! Also, how can we have a truly democratic school system of equal opportunity when it's based on property taxes, which are always lower in inner city neighborhoods and higher in wealthy suburbs? Even after the Civil War, such a financing system helped keep African schools much less excellent than white schools, and do to this day. That fact alone implies the federal government definitely has an educational financial role to play, especially when it comes to helping poor and low income families get better educated. Conservative Ronald Reagan’s Education Secretary William Bennett wanted to eliminate the entire Department of Education completely! Folks, the conservative educational challenge is real and on-going!
In the early 1900s Dewey helped people see they can confidently criticize such conservative roles for both teachers and students even at the primary school level, and also suggest better ways of producing more healthful social results. Why? Simply because we mean to keep building a more democratic world where concentrated feudal power is less dangerous and stressful for most everyone! As many people are realizing today, unrestricted capitalism leads inevitable to dangerous and stifling monopolistic power! We liberals simply mean to change the basic feudal institutions we’ve inherited from the ancient Greek and Roman worlds of Plato, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, and Augustine of Hippo. In today’s growing democratic world, where petty dictators, greedy wealthy folks, and conservative politicians are less tolerated, such schools simply help produce better social results, especially teaching the next generation how to intelligently build a more peaceful and enjoyable world for everyone with experimental learning! In today’s much more educated world, where millions have more democratic feelings about equal rights and opportunities, more people than ever before are seeing even religious models of truth reflect human habits and practices more than anything else. Thus, there's even less justification for demanding everyone must learn the same kinds of facts. No matter what field someone chooses to play on, it’s up to the people to intelligently challenge those who continue believing money should be used to create a feudalistic status quo, and make politicians continue passing laws perpetuating it. If a more intelligent experimental learning habit-art isn't taught to the next generation, starting in primary school, then in effect the conservative educational challenge will continue, and helping condemn some children to living not much better than animals, and using blind trial-and-error actions and make a quick buck whichever way they can!
As we saw in the last section, it’s certainly not difficult to start using an experimentally intelligent habit-art to make life better; as parents soon find out, children are like mental sponges, and easily learn new habits, skills, and ideas. They can easily learn what it feels like to actually enjoy improving both their own habits and their social world. Again, they can learn to enjoy respecting just laws, and intelligently helping others to help themselves, if they get the proper training. Don’t we want a nation of intelligent and caring business and professional people, who care about improving the world around them as well as their own weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits, rather than merely padding their own wallets throughout life? If so, then what better way to keep answering that greedy challenge than by actually practicing such skills experimentally?
No doubt, at first such classrooms might be noisier and more chaotic than quiet conservative book-centered classrooms would be, but there are many activities children can start exploring even in first grade. So, why not allow those students to start feeling they not only have the freedom to learn what they want, but also to learn with experimentally intelligent actions, and also learning to make the process enjoyable as well? It’ll then be that much easier later on to keep choosing intelligent actions, rather than greedy and harmful ones; the instinct will already be there. By their teenage years they’ll already have some solid instinctive feelings for intelligent experimentation, and how much more useful it is in the social world. They’ll already know such intelligent actions can often mean less frustration and danger in life, as well as paying lower taxes in adulthood for building more and more prisons for those who never learned to practice such intelligent actions. Instinctively, in such schools, they’ll already know it's much more useful to have the law on one's side. After all, conservatives who’re continually looking for more ways to make more money know it’s best to convince politicians to first pass laws in their favor. In the past 40 years the number of lobbyists in DC has gone from less than 200 to over 30,000! To us liberals it’s yet another sign of how addictive money-making can become, and how the strong the conservative challenge has become. We liberals say the sooner more students begin feeling more intelligent liberal values, the sooner our nation will become better at intelligently regulating our laws to better help everyone, rather than just the upper class.