A Letter to the Editor of the New Yorker: Response to Emma Green's article, "Old School"

(Ms. Green’s article about the Classical School Movement)

Dear Editor:

It makes me glad that we get articles exploring what is going on in schooling with some depth.  I thank Ms. Green for this.  It is natural that I appreciate attention to the issue, since I have been immersed in at as a teacher, then a teacher of teachers and a scholar of education. Unfortunately, having been all those things, I get nitpicky.  I offer some information to amend what was in the article and then a view on an important matter that the article brings to our attention.

John Dewey frequently gets a bad rap, mostly because people encounter labels or short quotes identified with him but have not read his books where he describes his views carefully and at length.  Dewey’s starting assertion was that we each build concepts by adding new experiences to our prior ones, a speculation that turned out to be a correct account of how learning works.  Dewey’s philosophy, experientialism, did not foreclose any learning experience, so long as the result is meaning in one’s mind.  It does not mean, as it has been often mistakenly interpreted, field trips and shop class.  Being engaged in a riveting book is more of an experience in the Dewey sense than going on a boring field trip. His argument was that all material, all method, should be servant to the meaning that the student will get from it. 

Experientialism does not condemn memorization, but remarks that it is useless if what has been memorized is not put to our own uses.  Neither would Dewey condemn reading Dante or Plato if we’re doing it to gain our own meanings from it.  Classics offer a rich source of meanings by the very definition of classic. For the teacher, bridging the gap from what students already have and think to engagement with the classic or anything else before them is the central work. 

This leads to another frequent error in understanding Dewey’s view: that “student centered” means that things must be immediately available or merely amusing.  This is not what Dewey meant.  Rather, interest is proven in the end in terms of durable, authentic knowledge in the person.  His was a synthetic use of the term interest. It mean to some extent something in which we take an interest, but also to some extent something that is in our interest.

It puzzled me when the article suggested Dewey’s views had taken over schooling.  With the exception of some experimental schools in the early part of the 20th century, Dewey’s ideas have had frustratingly little influence on public schooling.  Educational essentialists, whom we could also call administrative progressives, were put in charge of determining curricula. Their model was factories and their priorities were set by universities.  They took for granted that the key elements of curriculum are the content taught and the best order in which to teach it.  They are the ones whose courses and methods supplanted the classical education model.  The historic chain that has led us today to mistake test scores for education starts with them, not with Dewey.

I imagine he would be a fan of Ms. Green’s coverage in the article, because he believed, like Jefferson before him, that our democracy requires a citizenry of informed and critical thinkers, capable of understanding and engaging in arguments in public discourse and capable at discerning honest statecraft from chicanery. 

Dewey also suggested a distinction between socialization and indoctrination in schooling. 

This is where Ms. Green’s article takes us, into the distortion of classical schooling carried out explicitly for indoctrination into ideology. This is a public matter which deserves serious thought.  We have traditionally been generous about allowing families to determine what they wanted their children to experience and to be sheltered from.  This has been defended in terms of freedom of religion and of assembly.  Yet there is a human rights question here:  Should we be allowed to purposefully indoctrinate our children? They will be adults in our democracy who should have the liberty to determine their own beliefs and views starting with as full a scope of true information as we can provide. Considering this, is it moral to withhold the fact from teenagers that gender in societies is a fluid concept across time and place?  Is it ethical to indoctrinate children into the ridiculous belief that Christianity, Europe, and the U.S are the center of the total human experience? It is a commonplace that we are free to have our own opinions, but not our own facts. Yet so far, we have been allowed to teach our opinions as facts to our children, and this presents more of a moral conundrum than we have yet to acknowledge.

Best regards,

Wm. Gregory Harman