Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (review)

The purpose that this book sets out for itself is to chronicle an intellectual history of American education, showing how educational and political trends in the 1930s and 1940s shaped education in the 1950s. Education and the Cold War is an adaptation of a dissertation: this may have something to do with the fact that it is not at all lacking in breadth, pouring copious detail about a large number of educational figures in both conservative and progressive intellectual milieus.

Education and the Cold War swerves between documentary evidence and philosophical reflection, and so reading it is like eating something very rich—one may not wish to go through the whole thing in one sitting. Generally, I found the tastiest parts to be the most philosophical ones. Hartman really shines in his depiction of progressive education in the later life of John Dewey and afterward. This book chronicles a little-discussed period in American educational history, that between the Progressive Era and the progressive educational experiments of the 1960s. Here Hartman wishes to show us that there's something important to be studied about the history in between.

Hartman's version of history starts with the Progressive-Era reflections of John Dewey (chapter 1), who was "radical to a forgotten degree" (25) for his endorsement of economic democracy. Dewey's legacy, as Hartman points out, is that of "child-centered" education, education that starts with children themselves, with their wants and needs. Deweyan education is hard-headed in its focus on outcomes that are relevant to the later lives of students.

Yet the progressive education movement that Dewey made famous was recruited toward the goals of the political status quo. Hartman's take on Deweyan pragmatism suggests both a liberating and a constraining side to educational pragmatism (13), situating its history into a history of developing corporate capitalism. For me, this is where this book is most interesting. Was Deweyan education radical, or was it just another adaptation to corporate life in the 20^th century?

This theme returns again and again as Hartman tells the tales of the most famous educators of the 1930s, the 1940s, and the 1950s. Chapter 2, about education during the Great Depression, focuses on the right-wing reaction to left-wing progressive education in the 1930s. Hartman suggests that progressive education had itself become co-opted after World War II in the form of the "life adjustment movement." This was a conscious effort, spearheaded by the U.S. Office of Education, to promote conformism in education. Here Hartman brings up the possibility of a "bad pragmatism," a mode of dealing with reality that adheres to certain tenets of pragmatism (notably "dealing with the world as it is") while at the same time adapting itself to ends which ought not to be ours.

As Hartman points out later in the third chapter, "life adjustment education did more than serve the industrial order; it was also instrumental to the military industrial order" (63). Thus "postwar progressive educators visualized students as cogs to be integrated into the machines of human organization"(65). Those who were college material were trained for college; the others had to choose lower "niches" in life. This sort of pragmatism, as one can see, ignores the extent to which schooling might constitute a productive, meaningful struggle for success and agency in favor of an early adjudication for the sake of capitalist discipline. Hartman also points to the ways in which "a gender-specific curriculum was consistent with the life adjustment prioritization of family and consumer education" (69). In short, life adjustment education was sexist; it taught girls "kitchen physics," in which girls learned "how to keep coffee warm for their future husbands" (69). We can, then, feel fortunate that those throughout history who struggled for women's liberation were not pragmatists of this sort.

In Chapters 4 and 5 Hartman documents the "Red scare" in 1950s education, when educational "pragmatists" such as Sidney Hook...