Progressivism's Aesthetic Education: The Bildungsroman and the American School, 1890–1920 by Jesse Raber (review)

At the heart of Progressive Era social and political reforms was a vision of unified national purpose. America was no longer a frontier country of individual, autonomous citizens but an increasingly complex industrial society requiring a national vision in which disparate individuals willingly participated in social action for the public's economic, social, and political interests and in mutually beneficial "reciprocal relations" (31). Social action progressives of the time called for education that prepared citizens for this visionary reformed society. Jesse Raber's ambitious book investigates how Americans envisioned learning about themselves and their place in such a society, and how this Bildung could be accomplished in a time of great national change amid an expanding population of voices. His transdisciplinary study weaves together philosophy, social reform ideology, educational psychology, and literary history to critique the role of public education in support of this progressive national vision, focusing specifically on how professional educators and authors understood that aesthetic education—the study of fine arts and literature—simultaneously advanced individual development and prompted social action. Raber's approach introduces fresh connections between aesthetic theory, education theory, literary production, and social action in American fiction.

Raber's first chapter offers a clear, finely nuanced introduction to the philosophical questions for achieving Bildung in the American context after the close of the frontier. Successful creation of social identity required mediating the individualism that lay at the very heart of the country's ideals in order to create pragmatic, optimistic, nationally focused citizens. Within the era's new public education system, as well as in its literary works, aesthetic experience, "that freest, most spontaneous, and most all-inclusive mode of experience," was deemed by social action progressives to be the most effective route to producing socially focused individuals, since such spontaneous and unfiltered experiences would ultimately produce empathy, rational restraint, and understanding that led to social action (7). Some educators defined aesthetic education as experiential learning grounded in sensory perceptions, while others advocated developing appreciation for established standards of beauty accepted by the dominant cultural order, a difference of perspective that Raber must continually navigate as his study moves from theory to application. Raber also asserts that successful aesthetic education offered avenues to social development but also risked making educators agents of cultural authority that forced students to accept preferences of the dominant social order.

Having established a finely nuanced philosophical grounding for education via the arts, Raber turns to literary criticism in chapters 2 through 4, arguing that Progressive Era authors Abraham Cahan, Willa Cather, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman created American adaptations of Bildungsroman that corresponded to contemporary educational theorists and fulfilled the need for literature focused on social and political reforms to promote individual investment in a common national purpose. Chapter 2 compares Abraham Cahan's writings to the Herbartian "Doctrine of Interest," which proposed that students learn best through engagement with concepts in a series of scaffolded and interconnected lessons led by a dynamic teacher (58). Noting that Cahan's journalism and fiction employed Herbartian-style dialogue of familiar language and everyday events to instruct his readers about science and politics and to promote socialism, particularly in Vi Azoy Rafael Na'arizokh Is Gevorn a Sozialist, Raber argues that ultimately in The Rise of David Levinsky, a "great bildungsroman of unfulfillment," Cahan could only use aesthetic instruction to suggest rather than produce social action (78). Chapter 3 pairs Maria Montessori's pedagogical methods with Willa Cather's novels. Montessori and Cather shared Kantian aesthetic notions of education through the senses with careful (and isolated) cultivation of the individual's creative force. Raber demonstrates that Cather's ideas about simplified spaces expressed in "The Novel Démeublé" reflect Montessori's theories about classroom structure and that Cather's pared-down style, particularly in The Song of the Lark, O Pioneers!, and My...