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Introduction: Progressivism’s Aesthetic Education

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Progressivism's Aesthetic Education

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Abstract

In trying to establish the democratic legitimacy of a self-policing educational profession within the public schools, Progressive Era educators developed theories of aesthetic education that resemble those of classical German Bildung. Where classical Bildung uses aesthetic education to reconcile the autonomous individual with a certain social order, though, “Progressivism’s Aesthetic Education” tries to prepare the individual to participate in democratic social action, a collective deliberative process. John Dewey’s is the most compelling version of this program, but other variants are found in American Herbartianism, Montessori education, and social efficiency education. Novelists, including Abraham Cahan, Willa Cather, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, wrote bildungsromans that variously express and critique these ideas. This chapter also contains an extended discussion of the aesthetic ideas of Horace Mann.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    John Holt, How Children Fail (London: Pittman, 1969); Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1970); Charles L. Glenn, The American Model of State and School (New York: Continuum, 2012); Edward Eggleston, The Hoosier Schoolmaster: A Novel (New York: Orange Judd & Co., 1871); Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education: With a New Preface and Epilogue (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).

  2. 2.

    Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Collected Works 9: Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship , trans. Eric A. Blackall (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2004); ; Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman and European Culture (London: Verso, 2000); Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996); Gregory Castle, Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2015); Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

  3. 3.

    Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).

  4. 4.

    Greene’s point about the darkness of classic American literature is from Maxine Greene, The Public School and the Private Vision: A Search for America in Education and Literature (New York: Random House, 1965), 2–6. The other authors in this paragraph will be cited later as they are mentioned.

  5. 5.

    Castle , Modernist Bildungsroman, 7, 15.

  6. 6.

    John Dewey, School and Society & The Child and the Curriculum. (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, [1901] 2012), 18.

  7. 7.

    Moretti , Way of the World, 15–16.

  8. 8.

    Redfield , Phantom Formations, 13.

  9. 9.

    Schiller , Aesthetic Education of Man, 34–35.

  10. 10.

    Schiller , Aesthetic Education of Man, 30.

  11. 11.

    Redfield, Phantom Formations, 7.

  12. 12.

    Schiller , Aesthetic Education of Man, 33.

  13. 13.

    Slaughter , Human Rights, Inc., 8–9.

  14. 14.

    Castle, Modernist Bildungsroman, 11.

  15. 15.

    Redfield , Phantom Formations, 22.

  16. 16.

    Schiller, Aesthetic Education of Man, 113, 120, 76, 122, 51.

  17. 17.

    Redfield, Phantom Formations, 21, 49; Moretti, Way of the World, 72; Redfield, Phantom Formations, 53.

  18. 18.

    Redfield, Phantom Formations, 76; Schiller quoted from ibid., 67; Wilhelm Meister quoted from Slaughter, Human Rights Inc., 97; Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 214.

  19. 19.

    Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 215.

  20. 20.

    Redfield, Phantom Formations, 53; Wilhelm Meister quoted in ibid., 78; Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 269.

  21. 21.

    Castle, Modernist Bildungsroman, 3.

  22. 22.

    Glenn , American Model of State and School, 48; Mann quoted in Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 161.

  23. 23.

    Ellwood P. Cubberley, Changing Conceptions of Education (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 35.

  24. 24.

    Merle Curti, The Social Ideas of American Educators (Totowa, N.J.: Littlefield, Adams, 1966), 111.

  25. 25.

    Howe, Making the American Self, 130. For the role of the mental-muscle metaphor in the history of curriculum design, see Daniel Tanner and Laurel Tanner, History of the School Curriculum (New York : Macmillan, 1990), 41; and William Pinar et al, Understanding Curriculum (New York : Lang, 1995), 73.

  26. 26.

    Horace Mann, Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Education (New York: Hugh Birch-Horace Mann Fund of the National Education Association, 1950 [1844]).

  27. 27.

    Charles De Garmo, Herbart and the Herbartians (New York: C. Scribner’s sons, 1896), 38.

  28. 28.

    Joel Spring, The American School, A Global Context: From the Puritans to the Obama Administration (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2010), 83.

  29. 29.

    Curti, Social Ideas of American Educators, 112–113, 58, 60.

  30. 30.

    Michael B. Katz, School Reform: Past and Present (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 170.

  31. 31.

    Orestes Brownson, “Education of the People,” The Boston Quarterly Review 2, no. 4 (1839), 393–434.

  32. 32.

    For Pestalozzi’s impact on American art education, see Arthur Efland, A History of Art Education: Intellectual and Social Currents in Teaching the Visual Arts (New York: Teachers College Press, 1990), 77.

  33. 33.

    Glenn, American Model of State and School, 49.

  34. 34.

    Greene, Public School and the Private Vision, 116–117.

  35. 35.

    William Torrey Harris, Art Education: The True Industrial Education (Syracuse, NY: C.W. Bardeen, 1897).

  36. 36.

    David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 29, 40; Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 119.

  37. 37.

    Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 6, 63.

  38. 38.

    James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 349.

  39. 39.

    Esty, Unseasonable Youth, 4, 6, 27.

  40. 40.

    Castle, Modernist Bildungsroman, 1.

  41. 41.

    John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Cosimo Classics, [1920] 2008), 127; Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 58, 69; Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914), 179.

  42. 42.

    Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History: Address Delivered at the Forty-First Annual Meeting of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, December 14, 1893, 112.

  43. 43.

    Wiebe, Search for Order, 12; Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 363.

  44. 44.

    Daniel Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10, no. 4 (December 1982): 113-132; Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).

  45. 45.

    Croly, Promise of American Life, 109–110, 187, 9.

  46. 46.

    Lippmann, Drift and Mastery, xvi.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., xix, xvi, xx.

  48. 48.

    Edmund Wilson, Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s (New York: Library of America), 422.

  49. 49.

    Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 357, 359.

  50. 50.

    James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 294, 80; Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 13; Jane Thrailkill, Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 51.

  51. 51.

    John Dewey, Individualism Old and New (London: Allen and Unwin, 1931), 171.

  52. 52.

    Lawrence Buell, The Dream of the Great American Novel (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 120.

  53. 53.

    Rivka Shpak Lissak, Pluralism and Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 23.

  54. 54.

    Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 349, 376; Wiebe, Search for Order, 160.

  55. 55.

    Turner, Significance of the Frontier, 112.

  56. 56.

    John Dewey, Democracy and Education (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, [1915] 2004), 89.

  57. 57.

    George Basil Randels, “The Doctrines of Herbart in the United States.” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1909), 29, 64. “Apperception” is the title and topic of the 14th chapter of William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology; and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (New York: Henry Holt, 1900).

  58. 58.

    Victor Kestenbaum, The Phenomenological Sense of John Dewey: Habit and Meaning (New York: Humanities Press, 1977); Victor Kestenbaum, The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal: John Dewey and the Transcendent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

  59. 59.

    Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Thomas M. Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987); Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015); Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination (New York: Wiley, 2000), 133; Maxine Greene, The Dialectic of Freedom (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988); Philip W. Jackson, John Dewey and the Lessons of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Kestenbaum, Grace and Severity of the Ideal; Scott Stroud, John Dewey and the Artful Life: Pragmatism, Aesthetics, and Morality (State College, PA: Penn State Press, 2012); Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 361.

  60. 60.

    Arthur Bestor, ed., Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Our Public Schools (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, [1953] 1985).

  61. 61.

    Maxine Greene, “Identities and Contours: An Approach to Educational History,” in History, Education, and Public Policy, ed. Donald R. Warren (Berkeley: McCutchan, 1978); John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Touchstone, [1938] 1997), 55–56.

  62. 62.

    Dewey quoted in Kestenbaum, Grace and Severity of the Ideal, 180; William James, “Pragmatism and Religion,” in Writings, 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1988).

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    Jesse Raber

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Raber, J. (2018). Introduction: Progressivism’s Aesthetic Education. In: Progressivism's Aesthetic Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90044-5_1

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