The educators among you should know that the drive for free public schools in the Northeast in the 1830s was motivated, according to Charles Sellers, by "bourgeois panic" that the ignorant and vicious working masses, armed with universal suffrage, would otherwise overwhelm decent society.
I have never encountered this idea before, but Sellers does indeed quote that icon of American education, Horace Mann, to great effect:
I have never encountered this idea before, but Sellers does indeed quote that icon of American education, Horace Mann, to great effect:
Mann warned that "if the ignorant and vicious get possession of the [political] apparatus, the intelligent and virtuous must take such shocks as the stupid or profligate experimenters may choose to administer." The school campaign, as parodied by Ralph Waldo Emerson, appealed to fear of a politicized majority -- "you must educate them to keep them from our throats."
With "unmitigated anxiety," Mann demanded that solid citizens support free schools as a "barrier against . . . those propensities . . . which our institutions foster." Thus, and only thus, "nobler faculties can be elevated into dominion and supremacy over the appetites and passions," he insisted, for "if this is ever done, must be mainly done during the docile and teachable years of childhood."
The continuing failure of American education, the last three or four generations, is confirming the views of both men. Some - such as Chomsky - may say that this is failure by design, others that it is accidental or happenstance. Why, How, and What are three different ways of looking at the same thing. Whatever the cause, and whatever the reason, something needs to be done, and soon.
ReplyDeleteNoam Chomsky cites these words of Emerson in interviews more than once but interprets it a little differently than you. He understands Emerson's words to mean that "that millions of people are getting the vote, and we have to educate them to keep them from our throats. In other words, we have to train them in obedience and servility, so they're not going to think through the way the world works and come after our throats."
ReplyDeleteMann may be speaking from a different, populist angle, as Dewey did, saying that a democratic society depends on the education of the people. Without education, self-rule is not possible.
The continuing failure of American education, the last three or four generations, is confirming the views of both men. Some - such as Chomsky - may say that this is failure by design, others that it is accidental or happenstance. Why, How, and What are three different ways of looking at the same thing. Whatever the cause, and whatever the reason, something needs to be done, and soon.