Kieran Egan
Faculty of Education,
Simon Fraser University,
Burnaby, B.C. Canada V5A 1S6
Introduction
Chapter 1 The strange case of Herbert Spencer
Chapter 2 Learning according to nature's plan
Chapter 3 Development, progress, and the biologized mind
Chapter 4 The useful curriculum
Chapter 5 Research has shown that . . .
Conclusion
I have been fortunate to have received comments on the ms. of this book and suggestions for its improvement from a number of kind and incisively critical people. Jack Martin and Jeff Sugarman, colleagues at Simon Fraser University, have been generous with their time and suggestions, for which I am grateful. As has John Willinsky, at the University of British Columbia; though his help came more from chatting about the ideas of the book while he hefted stones and moved earth in aiding me in the construction of my Japanese garden. Two teachers, administrators, and scholars, who have been graciously helpful over the years, have also contributed to this volume; it is a pleasure to acknowledge Apko Nap, in British Columbia, and Marc Heller, in Connecticut.
During the writing of the book, I have had the good fortune to be able to discuss its arguments with Dr. Natalia Gajdamashko, who has been a visiting scholar at Simon Fraser University. I value her suggestions for improving the book, especially with regard to Vygotsky's work, but also with regard to a range of theoretical issues. Hannah Gay, of Simon Fraser University's history department, has kindly read the chapter on Herbert Spencer and made a number of suggestions that have improved it considerably, though she mustn't be blamed for its remaining insufficiencies.
I have been the grateful recipient of grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and from the Spencer Foundation. These grants have enabled me to travel to conferences where I was able to present some of the ideas in the book and to receive useful criticisms. These generous grants also enabled me buy some time for writing and to hire graduate assistants. Cliff Falk and Jan Bonzon provided extensive and insightful comments on the whole ms. The student whose daunting assiduousness and energetic and intelligent help is mentioned in the text is Emery Hyslop-Margison, who deserves special thanks.
Devi Pabla and Eileen Mallory turned my scrawling handwriting into immaculate typescript. Ms. Mallory retired just as the typescript was completed&endash;&endash;not, I hope, a causal connection. She has typed more words of mine that either of us cares to remember, and, indeed, I feel by now I need only mention a topic and she could probably write the book without me. I have been happy to acknowledge her help in nearly all my previous books, and it is with real sadness that I make this, probably last, printed expression of heartfelt thanks.
Imagine you are a forty-five-year-old white middle-class man travelling by railway train into a medium-sized American town in 1887. You would likely see some new buildings going up. Perhaps the biggest is a factory, and nearby are the shells of houses for the workers, and perhaps there is a new church and a school underway. You are financially comfortable and aware that your own personal wealth and that of your neighbors is growing as a direct or indirect result of the products of these new factories and the trade they generate. The town is increasing in population, there are more, and more varied, shops and services, and new inventions are transforming your life.
Let us say you know that the factory under construction, which you are turning to look at as you go by, will make equipment for the new electric lighting system. Your home is now lighted by gas, with a few older kerosene lamps for use in upstairs rooms. You would know that a decade ago Sir Joseph Wilson Swan had invented a new incandescent lamp by heating carbon filaments in a glass bulb from which the air was partially evacuated. In the following year, Thomas Alva Edison came up with the same idea but, unlike the Englishman, Edison developed plans for the power-lines and equipment needed to establish a practical lighting system. You can foresee this new electric light replacing the less safe, less clean, and less efficient system you currently use.
All this change, these buildings and inventions, the growing town and shifting patterns in people's lives, you recognize, somewhat proudly, as progress. Being a progressive modern man you have learned the ideas propounded by other white middle-class men during the past half-century or so. Unlike all your ancestors, and unlike all people in other than modern Western societies, you confidently believe that the world developed from a mass of molten matter to its present life-supporting form, that life itself evolved from the simplest bugs to that pinnacle of life on the planet&endash;&endash;yourself, and that civilizations have similarly evolved from primitive beginnings to the inventive sophistication of your own. This social evolution from primitive to modern societies, you recognize, has not, of course, been uniform; many societies remain in a developmentally "primitive" condition, still living a life reflective of "the childhood of mankind". You understand the now-common phrase "the childhood of mankind" as capturing the sense in which "primitive" people's minds are inferior to your modern mind much as children's minds are inferior to those of adults.
As a progressive modern man you will have read the celebrated and influential essay written 30 years earlier by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) called "Progress: Its Law and Cause." Spencer had persuaded you, and many others, that "progress is not an accident, not a thing within human control, but a beneficent necessity" (Spencer,1966, p. 60). He had established that this underlying law was "displayed in the progress of civilization as a whole, as well as in the progress of every nation; and is still going on with increasing rapidity" (1966, p.19). That factory, those new houses, the train you are riding in are all confirming evidence of his compelling argument.
As your train carries you on, at a speed and with a comfort unimaginable to any traveler before you in history, you recognize that the physical and social changes you see are reflected in, or are products of, a ferment of new ideas. The number and novelty of these new ideas is disruptive on a scale never before experienced. The result creates anxiety in those who see the foundations of their old intellectual world being threatened, but is exhilarating to progressive minds like your own.
Let us say, as you passed that school being built, you turned to look at it with a particular and professional interest because you are a recently appointed senior official of this newly organized school division. The ferment of ideas you are aware of will prominently include those about education. You hold decided ideas about how the new state schools should go about educating all the children in society for the New World. The new world that is tangibly coming into form around you would be the world they will inhabit, and you are keenly aware that it will be quite unlike the world you grew up in. Your educational ideas have also been influenced by the redoubtable Mr. Spencer, who has written at length about education, as he has written about nearly every other topic a modern man might turn his mind to. Spencer made a triumphant lecture tour around America in 1882 and, let us say, you attended two of his exciting talks. His ideas about education draw on the same fundamental principles that undergird his progressive arguments about the development of life, of civilization, and of individuals' potential.
Well, let us imagine now that you are you&endash;&endash;a tougher call perhaps&endash;&endash;and consider our man on the railway train from the outside. He was an agent in creating the kind of schools we still have. He, and hundreds like him, shaped the new schools under the influence of a set of powerful educational ideas. During the late nineteenth century, the modern apparatus for schooling everyone was put in place. My topic is the ideas about education that shaped these new state schools into the forms we have lived with since, and particularly the ideas about children's minds, and their modes of learning and development, which have determined the curriculum and the organization of schools.
In the 1850s Herbert Spencer wrote four essays on education. They were published separately in journals, but he had intended from the beginning that they would appear as a single volume. That volume was published in New York under the title Education: Intellectual, Moral and Physical in 1860, and in London the following year. By the end of the 1860s the book had appeared in 15 separate editions from seven different publishers. During the 1870s it was reprinted in New York 9 times by D. Appleton alone, and in the 1880s there were 15 different printings, all but two of which were in the U.S.A. (The laxness of copyright laws, especially concerning foreign publications, helps account for this proliferation.) In the 1890s, it seems, a slow-down in popularity occurred, with only 13 printings during the decade, including editions from seven different American publishers. Appleton alone sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
The later nineteenth century was a crucial period for educational thinking. Rapid population growth, industrial development, and the beginnings of universal schooling coincided with reverberations from the stunning theory of evolution. Herbert Spencer stood at this crux. He drew on a range of new ideas and shaped a set of educational principles that became and have remained fundamental in the thinking of those who have had responsibility for our schools, even if their historical source has become invisible to those who hold them.
The historian of education, Lawrence Cremin, describes the 1890s as revolutionary for education in America. He cites the influential books that appeared in that decade, including William James's Principles of Psychology in 1890, and his Talks to Teachers on Psychology in 1899, Francis W. Parker's Talks on Pedagogics in 1894, Edward L. Thorndike's Animal Intelligence in 1898, and John Dewey's The School and Society in 1899. Cremin might have extended his time frame a little to include G. Stanley Hall's two volume Adolescence: Its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education in 1904. These "revolutionaries" had in common the fact that they were all profoundly influenced by Spencer's work: "If the revolution had a beginning, it was surely with the work of Herbert Spencer" (Cremin, 1961, p.91). In the generation after Spencer's death, it was uncontentious to claim for the collection of educational essays he wrote that "[m]ore than any other single text-book it is the foundation of all the so-called 'modern' ideas in education" (Samuel & Elliot, 1917, p. ).
Lawrence Cremin has also claimed that "by the 1950s the more fundamental tenets of the progressives had become the conventional wisdom of American education" (Cremin, 1976, p. 19). And many people today claim that our schools' ineffectiveness is due precisely to the influence of these progressivist ideas. But those sympathetic to progressivism tend to be irritated by such claims, because, from their point of view, schools and teaching are dominated by the same old dull approaches to education that they have been trying to change for more than a century. And they believe that our schools' ineffectiveness is due precisely to the influence of these traditionalist ideas. Progressivism, in their view, has never been put into practice. Paul Goodman in the 1960s, echoing many before him and echoed since by many others, argued that as soon as attempts are made to apply progressivist ideas in schools the ideas become "entirely perverted" (Goodman, 1964, p. 43); their radical nature becomes first watered down and then sinks into the persisting stale routines of the traditional classroom.
In this book I want to show incidentally that both of the above claims&endash;&endash;that progressivist ideas have become central to educational thinking, and that they have never been implemented on any significant scale&endash;&endash;are largely true.
What are the ideas that make up progressivism? The central belief&endash;&endash;the most fundamental tenet of progressivism&endash;&endash;is that to educate children effectively it is vital to attend to the nature of the child, and particularly to their modes of learning and stages of development, and to accommodate educational practice to what we can discover about these. The fact that this belief is almost universally shared among educators today supports Cremin's observation about how widely progressivism's tenets have become the conventional wisdom of American education, and Western education generally. But it is precisely this belief that I will show is mistaken.
My argument will be unfamiliar, I think. I will not be arguing against progressivism on the basis of the usual alternatives of "liberal" or "traditional" theories of education or because it is not adequately attuned to preparing students for jobs. My critique will be unfamiliar also, I suspect, because it will be coming from someone who has considerable sympathy with progressivist ideals.
Progressivism has historically involved a belief in attending to the nature of the child, and consequently its research arm (so to speak) has involved studies to expose that nature more precisely. Because the mind is prominent in education, psychology became the consistent scientific handmaiden of progressivism. The psychologist exposes the nature of students' learning or development and the practitioner is then to make teaching methods and curricula accord with what science has exposed. ("Education, therefore, must begin with a psychological insight into the child's capacities . . . It must be controlled at every point by reference to these same considerations" (Dewey, 1974, p. 430). "The law for presenting and treating [educational] material is the law implicit within the child's own nature" (Dewey, 1974, p. 435).)
One or another form of progressivism has been promoted and tried in the schools of North America since the beginning of mass schooling in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Usually, progressivist practices have been promoted on the grounds that if only teachers will attend to the new knowledge gained by research about learning or development and follow what that research implies for teaching or curricula, an educational revolution will take place. Each new generation of progressivist educators has, first, to explain what was wrong with his or her predecessors' attempts to implement the ideas&endash;&endash;because the promised revolution consistently fails to occur&endash;&endash;and then explain why her or his new approach will do the job.
So we may see the attraction the work of Jean Piaget had for progressivists. Piaget claimed to expose in a new and fuller way the nature of children's intellectual development, and from his work progressivist educators sought to learn how to apply those insights to educational practice. Or we may see the attraction of the cognitive science research which Howard Gardner uses to support what he describes as his "sympathy with the vision generally termed 'progressive'" (1991, p. 189). The problems with past attempts to implement progressivist ideas are, he thinks, reparable by drawing on "recent advances in our understanding of individual learning" (p. 246).
My task, then, is to expose a flaw in what seem to me the most widely held beliefs among educators today. While the ideas that I think are false are foundational to progressivism, they seem also to be held by very many who might even consider themselves critics of progressivism&endash;&endash;which is where the point of Cremin's observation about the movement's tenets having become the conventional wisdom of American education comes in.
My subtitle includes some of the main figures whose work has shaped the modern forms of progressivism and modern conceptions of education. Of the three I mention, the least well-known today is Herbert Spencer, whose crucial role in the formation of progressivism, and whose influence on modern schooling, seem to me much underestimated, for reasons I will give in Chapter One. This may seem an oddly balanced work, in which Spencer will receive the lion's share of attention and Dewey, for example, will be represented as drawing significantly on Spencer's work. Perhaps it might seem a little offensive to identify what is usually thought of as a quintessentially American movement as derived significantly from the work of another dead white European male. Causality in ideas is, of course, difficult to trace with any security. Spencer's is certainly just one of many voices promoting not dissimilar ideas during those years on both sides of the Atlantic. Even so, while you may take the centrality of Spencer in my account as merely a kind of rhetorical stand-in for others, those constant re-printings of his book strongly suggest that it was his words that were most read. Spencer allied Rousseau's somewhat romantic view of educating with the authority of science, showing how child-centerdness and science together could provide the engine that would modernize and transform education. Also, not entirely coincidentally, this emphasis on Spencer is a kind of back-handed homage on the centenary of his death in 1902.
But this is not intended as a work of history. I will be looking at some historical figures, but only because it is sometimes easier to disinter the ideas that have been loaded with layers of complexity over the years by looking at their earlier appearance, and then seeing how they gradually transmute into the presuppositions of the present. It is a way of trying to make strange what is so familiar that we find it hard to think about. My topic is current education, and how the persistence of powerful progressivist ideas continues to undermine our attempts to make schooling more effective.
Charles A. Beard observed that "The world is largely ruled by ideas, true and false" (1932, p. ix). He went on to quote a "British wit" to the effect that "the power which a concept wields over human life is nicely proportioned to the degree of error in it" (1932, p. ix). We needn't give in to such cynicism, of course, but the witty point pricks because it sometimes seems true. The power that Spencer's ideas have wielded over educational thinking, I will try to show, is a sharp example of just this point.
In Chapter One I will outline some of the basic ideas of progressivism, showing their early expressions in the work of Herbert Spencer. I will also consider the strange case of Spencer's immense influence and almost vanished reputation. In the following three chapters I will look at progressivist ideas about learning, development, and the curriculum. In each case I will begin with Spencer's formulations&endash;&endash;which will, I suspect, surprise many readers, as they may have come to take such ideas as obviously true and perhaps believe them to have been originally Dewey's ideas. I will then consider how the ideas were elaborated by such figures as Dewey and Piaget, how they find their way into current practice, and show how they were wrong from their beginning, and haven't become any less wrong for a century's reiteration. In the final chapter I will try to show that much modern educational research is flawed by related presuppositions to those I identify in progressivism. I will, throughout the book, indicate the direction we need to move in to get beyond the pervasive flaw.
This book may be seen as a kind of companion to two others, the slim center between two larger chunks of text. The first of this sort-of trilogy is The Educated Mind: How cognitive tools shape our understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) and the third is Getting it Wrong from the Beginning: Major errors in the project to educate everyone (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming). All three explore some related issues, and there will here be some small overlaps with both of those books. They form part of a project to provide a fundamental critique of current educational theories and practice, and to outline an alternative that might move us towards more effective schooling in modern societies.