Cults of Ignorance

National Review, May 5, 2003 by M. D. Aeschliman

Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget, by Kieran Egan (Yale, 224 pp., $25)

'Spencer is unreadable today," the literary historian A. O. J. Cockshut has written, "but his immense prestige in his time [1820-1903], which extended as far as Russia, is a clear proof that complete ignorance of human nature will not necessarily prevent a man from becoming an acknowledged expert upon it." Indeed, Herbert Spencer's ideological mix of naive empiricism, laissez-faire Social Darwinism, and faith in inevitable progress swept to great influence in late-19th-century America.

This book is a historical study, analysis, and critique of the educational "Progressivism" and naturalism that Spencer took over from Rousseau and his German-speaking disciples. Spencer developed it into a glamorous "science," which was then further developed by John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick in the U.S., and Jean Piaget in Rousseau's hometown of Geneva. This line of descent, affiliation, and influence now forms the fundamental thought-world of American teachers' colleges and schools of education, perhaps most prominently Teachers College, Columbia University, whose initial patron was the conservative humanist Nicholas Murray Butler but whose guiding spirit soon became -- and has remained -- John Dewey.

Himself a professor of education and author of several books in the field, Kieran Egan contends that the Spencer-Dewey-Piaget legacy is fundamentally flawed intellectually, and that it has been a "catastrophe" for our teachers, their students, and the culture at large. He quotes what is perhaps Spencer's most notoriously fatuous assertion about human nature and history: He flattered and seduced his mid-19th-century audience by assuring it that "progress is not an accident, not a thing within human control, but a beneficent necessity." Two world wars, global Depression, Russian Bolshevism, Fascism, Nazism, the other instantiations of Communism, megadeath weaponry, a sexual plague, and the various other problems we now confront, including an increasingly toxic pop culture, have proved the falsehood of this antireligious ideology. Yet one of its effects -- the replacement, in the 20th century, of history teaching with courses in simplistic and soft-utopian "social studies" -- has, ironically, succeeded in preventing the widespread realization of just how wrong the "Progressives" were.

Egan is at great pains to show that Dewey and other 20th-century Progressives took over Spencer's educational thinking lock, stock, and barrel, but that for a strategic reason they stopped crediting him as their source. This reason was Spencer's Social Darwinism, which, though continuing to appeal to many on the right, became embarrassing to those on the left who had become welfare-state liberals or socialists (including the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb, to whom Spencer had been a tutor).

But the influence was undeniable. In 1911, former Harvard president Charles William Eliot, a chemist by training, assured readers of his anthology of Spencer's educational writings that the latter's "ideas on education . . . are now coming to prevail in most civilized countries, and they will prevail more and more." Prevail they did, but hardly to the benefit of civilization, as Egan carefully shows. Impatient with tradition, history, classical languages, and moral philosophy, Eliot gutted the Harvard undergraduate curriculum in the interest of a complete "elective" system.

Spencer and his follower Dewey shared this reductionist contempt for the traditional humanistic core of Western education, the education of what was styled "mere words" (as opposed to the reality of "things"). This ideological naturalism took hold somewhat later in Britain; from the 1960s on it made up for lost time, as the country's former chief inspector of schools, Chris Woodhead, has recently argued in his book Class War, a bestselling expose of the state of British education. A repentant Progressive, Woodhead recommends a return to the humanistic core of education best represented in the Anglo-American world by the writings of John Henry Newman, Matthew Arnold, and their many American heirs (including Mortimer Adler and Allan Bloom). Woodhead also notes the academic effectiveness of faith-based schools, which were anathema to Spencer and Dewey and their Progressive successors. In light of the Supreme Court's recent school-choice decision, there is more breathing room for these schools, which traditionally have been more resistant to Progressivism, and which disproportionately and successfully serve poor and minority children.

In developing his case against the "damaging bromides" of Spencer -- and their steady institutionalization by Dewey and Kilpatrick in teachers' colleges and K-12 public schools -- Egan looks carefully at the real effects of "child-centered" education, psychological "developmentalism," and what he usefully calls the "biologized view of mind" that changed curricula all over the Anglo-American world from common-sense transmitters of the cultural achievements of mankind to present-minded, experimental, experiential, naturalistic, and unchallenging approaches. As Richard Hofstadter pointed out over forty years ago in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Dewey's utopianism was rooted in a rejection of the validity of history as a guide to life and in a dogmatic faith in the beneficence of the future -- precisely Spencer's own view.