Liberalism and Beyond: Toward a Public Philosophy of Education

The educational philosophers who wrote in The Social Frontier dealt unabashedly with problems arising out of the social conflicts of their time. Their universe of discourse opened outward to the turbulent domains of politics, economics, and the ideational changes occurring all·around. Fundamental to their concern was the question of liberty in its relation to equality and social control. Rejecting 18th century atomistic notions, persistent dualisms, and the association of liberalism with laissez-faire ideas, they sought a view that “combined equality and liberty as coordinate ideals . . .”¹ Because this placed them in a position of opposition to what they called “finance-capitalism,” they then had to confront the problem of how socioeconomic structures could be changed without violent revolution and the loss of freedom. Unless those structures were changed, many of them believed, democratic education would be inconceivable. And democratic education, focused on the development of critical thinking and the release of human power for choice and action, was necessary if democracy itself was to be preserved.

For them, the “bewitchment of thought”² that endangered democracy was not due mainly to conceptual or linguistic confusions. They attributed it largely to the perpetuation of old pieties, outmoded “individualist” views of American society. The lags, the fixities of thought, were functions of a deficient status quo; they prevented people from redefining social goals. Centering their attention on the demands of an “age of collectivism,” the contributors to the Frontier showed no particular interest in what existentialists called the “human condition,” nor in “Being,” nor in the life of consciousness. They inhabited a world in which human intelligence, open communication, and cooperative action presumably could be counted upon to solve the major problems facing humankind. Differ though they might on political and social issues (the relevance of Marxism, the significance of class interest in America, the meanings of social reconstruction), they shared a range of fundamental commitments, many having to do with educational philosophy. Philosophy, as they viewed it, was not only the “theory of education;”³ its function was to direct educational practice and to shape its purposes. Since education was primarily a social enterprise of the moment for the future of society, educational philosophy’s basic concerns could not but be social and political. Indeed, its aims ought to be identical with those of democracy.

Dewey, Childs, Kilpatrick,. Brameld, Rugg, Bode, Counts, and the others were writing in a period of economic depression and transition, and in an atmosphere of precarious reforms. They were writing, too, at a time of fascist expansion and aggression abroad, culminating in the Second World War. The journal did not last long enough for them to have to come publicly to terms with the bombing of Hiroshima and the threat of nuclear obliteration. Although they knew about the existence of the German concentration camps, they appeared not to be familiar with. the Nazis’ invention of a “Final Solution,” the scientifically planned and executed extermination of millions of Jews. There was an occasional noting of signs in the wind with regard to the misuse of industrial power; but most contributors did not anticipate the consequences of science’s new links to technical undertakings (as at Los Alamos) nor to large-scale industrial production. Still optimistic about the scientific method and attitude and what they could achieve, they did not predict the domination by depersonalized technology of almost every area of social life; nor did they imagine the phenomenon of what Jacques Ellul was to call “self-augmenting technique.”⁴ There is little evidence that they confronted the influence of positivistic thinking and the split between empirical and moral considerations such thinking entailed. Moreover, although there were occasional comments about thought control by means of media, they were in no position to predict the effect television and radio would have on thinking as well as discourse; they could not have conceived what has been described as the “industrialization of the mind.”⁵ Perhaps most important, they did not (Dewey aside) see the overwhelming of a potentially “articulate public”⁶ by a mass of “job-holders and consumers,”⁷ including the members...