in
which our narrator considers the curiously broad appeal of John Dewey
The Secret Life of Teaching, #5
By Horace Dewey -- no (biological) relation
I write five words on the whiteboard five
times, each time underlining a different word:
All men are created equal.
All men
are created equal.
All men are
created equal.
All men are created
equal.
All men are created equal.
“So,
kids, are any of these statements
true?” I ask, turning around to face the class. “I mean, what
a crock of bull, right? How could Jefferson—himself a slave owner—possibly be
serious?"
A few wry smiles. Some of them have apparently asked themselves
this question before.
I love that line!" Vanessa Thompson, ever the contrarian in her
vintage Sex Pistols t-shirt. But she’s been too busy chatting with Janey Orlov
to be much of a presence today.
“Doesn’t
matter whether they believe it," says Eduardo Salinas. "It’s
propaganda.”
I try to mask my surprise. This is the first time I’ve heard from
Eduardo all year. I want to kindle the flame without smothering him.
“You think they’re lying?”
“Dunno,”
he replies. “Maybe.”
“You called this ‘propaganda.’ What do you mean by that?”
“I
mean they’re trying to persuade people.”
“Can propaganda be true?”
“I guess.”
“Do you think they were trying to persuade themselves?”
Eduardo shrugs. I
can’t tell if he’s expressing skepticism or a desire to be let off the hook.
“I think they did believe it,” Zoe Leoni says without raising her
hand. “I mean, you kind of have to believe it if you’re going to stick your neck out like
that."
“You say 'they. Do
'they' all think the same way?”
“No, probably not. But I don’t think they really have any choice. They’re desperate,
right? Didn’t you say yesterday that there’s like this big invasion the British
are planning?”
“Right. They’ve already landed on Long Island. They’re headed for
Manhattan even as the Declaration of Independence is being written.”
“So of course they’re going to talk about life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So it sounds like they’re the good guys.”
“But
how do they think they can get away with it?”
“It
was a bunch of rich white guys who wanted other people to help them,” Derek Simonson,
who sits next to Eduardo, blurts out with an edge of impatience in his voice. Wonder of wonders: two silent types in one day.
“I think you’re absolutely right,” I say, more eager to encourage
him than to pursue the angle of ideological difference between the
revolutionaries. “A big part of the Declaration was designed to attract foreign
support, especially the French. But here’s what I wonder, Derek: Is this really
the best language to use in order to do something like this? Let’s assume
you’re right: these guys are essentially a bunch of frauds, and that people
then could see through them then just like you are now. I'm reminded of the
famous writer Samuel Johnson’s response to the colonists: ‘How is it that we
hear the loudest yelps of liberty from the drivers of negroes?’ So how is a lot of talk of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
really going to convince anybody?”
Jiian Cheng raises his hand, and I acknowledge him. "I don’t
think they really have any choice. I mean, you gotta start somewhere.”
Laura Lynn wants to weigh in and I nod to her. “Jiian’s right.
It’s an important first step.”
“A step towards what?”
“Freedom. Independence. All that stuff.”
“Well, OK.” I point at the whiteboard. “But this says ‘all men are
created equal.’”
She hesitates. Then: “Yeah, that too.”
“So freedom and equality go together? How does this work—first we
get the freedom, then we do equality?”
She’s lost. “Yeah, kinda.”
I shift my gaze from Laura and make a puzzled expression to the
class generally. “I don’t get it,
kids. What does freedom have to do with equality? Are they the same thing?”
What I regard as a fruitful line of discussion is disrupted by
Wilhelmina (a.k.a. Willie) Sperry, who has already emerged as one of my
favorite kids, maybe of all time. I often see Willie walking the hallways,
hunched over a backpack that looks like it’s crushing her and bearing a grim
expression in marked contrast to the animated child who’s most fully alive in
the classroom. In other words, a girl after my own heart. Not pretty,
really—red-haired, flat-chested and a little scrawny, Willie’s warm personality
has always made her appealing, at least to adults and what seems to be a small
circle of friends. But will the boys see it? (Maybe it won’t matter; maybe she’s gay.) Willie, who has been silently following this conversation with her
usual intensity, chooses this moment to raise her hand. But I’m disappointed
that she seems to be taking us way off course. “They’re hypocrites,” she says. “The King simply has
to go after them. If they’re allowed to get away with this, it would set a bad
example. They have insulted him . . . .”
I begin to lose track of what Willie is saying. For one thing, it
seems tangential: what does the King have to do with what we’ve been talking
about? For another, I realize I’m hungry. And yet I marvel at how fully
immersed she is in this discourse. Even Janey Orlov has noticed. Not
approvingly.
I cut her off. “I’m not sure we need to shed any tears for George
III, Willie. If there’s anyone in the world who can brush off some punk critics,
surely it’s him. But I tell you who I am worried about,” I say, pausing for
effect. “The King of Spain.” I put my
hand on my chin, and narrow my eyes. "I mean, here’s a guy who’s going to
be losing sleep at night."
"Who is the King of
Spain?" Willie asks, genuinely curious.
I dunno," I reply, not changing my expression. "Carlos
the twenty-something. They were all called Carlos back then." The class
breaks into laughter.
"See, here’s the problem,” I say when it subsides. There’s nothing old Carlos would like more than to stick it to Britain. He wants it so badly he can almost taste it. The problem is that
if he and his Bourbon cousin Louis XVI enter an American war against Britain on the side of a group of rebels who have issued this
revolutionary manifesto, then his own subjects in places like Mexico and Peru might actually begin to take some of the nonsense in that
manifesto seriously. And that would be a real mess.”
“So what does he do?" This from Vanessa, who’s back among us.
My, my: I am on a roll today.
“Well, ultimately, he takes the plunge—he joins France and declares war on Britain. And his fears
prove justified, because even though he gets some real estate out the deal,
within a generation all hell breaks loose in Central and South America. Eventually, the Mexicos and Perus of the world declare their own independence. The King of France,
who tended not to worry as much, ends up literally losing his head in the name
of abstract ideals like freedom and equality—which, I’ll point out in passing,
we’re still lumping together as if they’re two sides of the same coin. We can’t
blame all of this on the Declaration of Independence, of course. But it
certainly didn’t help matters if you’re the King of Spain."
“Which,”
I continue, after a pause, “is another way of saying that you’re right, Eduardo
and Derek. The Declaration of Independence was a piece of propaganda by a
bunch of rich white guys who were desperate enough to say whatever they thought
might help them at that particular moment. The problem is that in so doing they
let a genie out of a bottle, because some people, despite much evidence to the
contrary, actually began to believe what the Declaration said—or, maybe more
accurately, they acted as if they believed what the Declaration said. ‘Acted,’ in the
sense that they pretended, and ‘acted’ also in the sense that they ended up
doing things that they otherwise might not have done had there been no
Declaration of Independence. That genie ended up doing a whole lot of mischief
all over the world.”
“Still does,” says Willie with a smile.
“You
think so?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” Willie is firm. So smart, so
innocent. Eduardo is packing up his books: my signal that my time is up. Derek
is looking, inscrutably, at Willie. Oh, dear girl.
“You think so too, Zoe? You think Willie
is right?”
She nods.
“Well, then, I guess we’ve figured this
all out. See you tomorrow.”
* * *
People of all temperaments and
ideological persuasions become teachers, but the nature of the job as it’s
currently constituted makes them instinctive progressives. I should add that
I’m using the term in multiple senses, some of which I am avowedly skeptical.
But their valences are powerful and should be recognized, even if they’re not
dominant in the U.S. education system in particular or American society
generally.
In its most specific educational
formulation, the word “progressive” refers to a pedagogical philosophy that
took root in the late nineteenth century and has in various iterations
persisted to this day. Its patron saint is John Dewey. Central to Dewey’s
vision was an emphasis on process (discussion) over product (test scores);
subjective experience over objective truth; learning by doing rather than
having information delivered. As a movement, progressive education in this
country probably peaked in the 1930s, and has largely persisted as an
alternative educational subculture in the decades since.
That said, important elements of the
progressive ethos have long been absorbed as common sense even in schools that
consider themselves traditional. Such schools may emphasize traditional values,
basic skills, and mastery of content (and relentless testing). But they will
hardly disparage—indeed, they will likely explicitly uphold—critical thinking,
diversity of thought and experience, and pragmatic problem solving, all of
which are hallmarks of progressive education. Virtually no educators will
assert the primacy or necessity of lecturing as the best or only means of
delivering instruction, even when teacher-centered information delivery is the
primary approach. Ironically, one of the major problems for the contemporary
progressive education movement as a
movement is that many of its core ideas are now taken for granted, even when
they conflict with others. So it is that parents and educators insist on growth
and rigor, or diversity and continuity, whether or not they’re
simultaneously achievable.
The second way teachers tend to be
progressive is more generally political. In school systems of all sizes, where
different constituencies jockey for maximum room to maneuver, teachers are the
inheritors of the Progressive tradition—note the capital “P” to distinguish
indicate the movement in electoral politics that spanned roughly from 1900 to
1920. It’s important to note, however, that there was a curious bifurcation in
the Progressive movement that it never entirely resolved. On of the one hand,
early Progressives were locally based, experimental, and highly empirical in
their approach to social reform (not just in schools, but also business
regulation, municipal services, and electoral reform, among other initiatives).
They were very much bottom-up. On the other hand, Progressives were also—and
this became increasingly apparent as the movement gained momentum in the second
decade of the twentieth century, when it dominated that nation’s political life
in both major parties—great centralizers of power, as long as it was
concentrated in the hands of independent experts who acted in the name of the
common good. If the settlement house worker Jane Addams personified the first
strand of Progressivism, Theodore Roosevelt was the epitome of the second. By
the time of Roosevelt’s successor, Woodrow Wilson, however, there were growing
questions about whether experts really could be trusted to act on the common
good—Wilson, who held a Ph.D. in political science, was notoriously high-handed
in his foreign policy, for example—and whether they really knew as much as they
thought they did. Though Progressives and their contemporary heirs have always
thought of themselves of champions of The People, their skeptics have always
regarded them, not without reason, as elitists insufferably blind to their own
arrogance.
Whether or not they identify as latter
day inheritors of the old Progressive tradition, most teachers in their
day-to-day lives embrace the Progressivism of the localized Jane Addams
variety. In contrast to administrators or politicians who want to impose their
ideas for reform from the top down, they see themselves working with the facts
on the ground: particular children responding to specific circumstances that
may or may not correspond to a reform template. To at least some extent, this
is a matter of self-interest: workers in many occupations tend to insist on the
necessity of discretion in performing their jobs well. But teachers aren’t the
only ones who make this case for their roles in the classroom; a long tradition
of reformers, some of them in positions of administrative authority, have
embraced the principle of teacher autonomy, even if this has always been a
minority view in policymaking circles.
The third and most decisive way in which
teachers tend to be progressive is what might be termed temperamental. In a
literal sense, to be a progressive is to believe in progress, and anyone who’s
in the business of educating children that does not believe in progress is
probably in the wrong line of work. In this realm, too, the word has multiple
meanings.
The most fundamental, of course, is at
the level of the individual child. Teachers must act as if—and at least try to
believe that—every student is capable of improving. This uniform principle gets
affirmed in highly variable ways. A good teacher will assess where a student is
and identify an attainable goal, and in a good teacher’s assessment of student
work, the distance that student has traveled will matter at least as much as
the objective quality of the work. The essence of fairness in this context
means taking differences into account, of honoring the struggle more than the
effortlessly achieved excellence.
This is an admittedly tricky matter, inherently subjective in nature.
But it’s a standard worth pursuing. The fact of the matter is that virtually
all students do make progress,
variously understood, over the course of their academic careers. The school or
instructional climate will never entirely account for it, though such factors
(among them a child’s teacher) really can matter.
This progressive principle also applies
to the craft of teaching itself. As anyone who’s done it for any length of time
will agree, you get better at as you go along. Improvement can take the form of
formal professional development, acquiring more knowledge from casual reading,
or simply mastering a curriculum by repeatedly teaching it. There is certainly
something to be said for the vitality of a new teacher, whose receptiveness to
experience and willingness to shoulder often onerous demands (like teaching
unfamiliar material) should not be underestimated as a source of institutional
vitality. And there’s no question that that dead wood—which is to say teachers
who have given up trying to grow—is a problem at virtually every school. But
the seasoned veteran teacher is an asset any successful school will have in
abundance.
The most profound way in which teachers
are temperamentally progressive is generational: they believe in the future, a
faith grounded in their engagement with the children who will take their place
as adults. Strictly speaking, a desire and ability to work with young people
doesn’t necessarily mean you think the future will be better than the past. (I don’t,
for reasons I’ll explain shortly.) But unless you’re animated by some sense of hope about tomorrow,
teaching becomes an exercise in grim fatalism, no doubt a contributing factor
in dead wood syndrome.
Perhaps more than teachers elsewhere,
American teachers have a particular attachment to seeing their work as part of
a larger drama in the progress of U.S. society. For much of the nineteenth
century, the dominant strain of historical interpretation in Great Britain and
the United States was the so-called Whig school, which emphasized the degree to
which history was a story of progress—moral no less than scientific—embodied in
the White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant politicians who emphasized the importance
of liberty (notably the liberty of American colonists in their revolutionary
struggle for independence, whose supporters in England were known as
Whigs). The Whig interpretation of
history fell out of favor around the time of the First World War—events in the
first half of the twentieth century discredited confident assumptions of
progress—and are regarded as racist today. But the notion that American life
has been one of gradual improvement remains an article of faith that continues
to animate everyday life inside as well as outside of classrooms.
You can see this progressive sensibility
in just about any U.S. history textbook. If the Whig school cast its notion of
progress in terms of white supremacy, these books instead depict a slow,
irregular, but unmistakable march toward pluralistic egalitarianism. Particularly
in the early going, these books have a demographic emphasis. We’re introduced
to groups of people of African, European, and Native American origin, and the
divisions and interplay between them.
However subjugated they are at the hands of imperial Europeans, those
shut out of power manage to maintain their dignity and their hope in the face
of considerable adversity. Though they experience tragedy, even catastrophe,
they manage collectively to live another day. They’ll have their postcolonial moment,
just like the United States has. History is destiny—of a hopeful kind. It’s
what we think students need.
But—and this was the point of that
opening anecdote—this progressive version of U.S. history is not something I tell them. This is something they
tell me. It’s a logic they’ve
absorbed into their bones long before they reach me. I’ve done this “all men
are created equal” exercise a bunch of times, and it always goes pretty much
the same way. I’ll usually get a student or two who says it really is nonsense.
But inevitably one or two students will come forward and say that such a
judgment is too harsh. I press them to explain, they may or may not flail in
their attempt to do so, and a classmate or two (or three) will jump in. The
gist of their riposte will be, in effect, that the Declaration of Independence
was a kind of first draft of progressive history. First the white men were
created equal. Then we remembered the ladies. Then the slaves got freed. And so
on through gay marriage. That’s our history. It may short on facts. But it’s
long on vision—which, let’s face it, is the most you can really hope for in a
history course.
My problem is I’m not sure I really believe it. Yes: it is
possible, desirable—right—to think of events like the ending of slavery,
suffrage for women, the egalitarian achievements of the Progressive era, the
New Deal, and the Civil Rights Movement(s) as constituting an upward moral as
well as material trajectory in American history. But if we stipulate that—and
we put aside social hydraulics that seem to suggest gains for some people
always seems to mean losses for others (e.g. the decline of economic equality
that has accompanied racial equality in the last four decades)—progress is not
a permanent state. Republics and empires come and go: that seems to be the iron law of history. The arc of history is
long, but it is an arc: what goes up
must come down.
Unfortunately, this is not something I’m
experiencing as an abstract proposition. Virtually every sentient American in
the early 21st century is uncomfortably aware of a discourse of
decline in our national life, particularly in the economic and political realm.
Though (shockingly for anyone over 30), events like 9/11, the Iraq War and the
financial crisis of 2008 are distant events for today’s students, all have
grown up in homes where recent history casts long shadows. For some students,
they loom large in their overall perception of American history; for others
they don’t, either because they haven’t fully absorbed their impact or because
they imagine them as developments that are not really part of the historical
record. Mostly, I think, reconciling recent events with their progressive
vision of history is a matter of living with cognitive dissonance in the form
of cultural lag that’s quite common to people in all times and places.
I don’t directly challenge the historical
progressivism of my students, other than to note at some point in the school
year that visions of history come in many shapes: circles, spirals, straight
lines, and inclines (I usually draw them for the visual learners). I don’t particularly want to evangelize
my fatalism, partially because my instinctive skepticism makes me question my
own certitude—events rarely happen in the way or at the pace we predict. But
even if I did have certainty, I wouldn’t push it on them, because I can’t see
how it would do them any good. I don’t want to puncture their confidence.
Instead, I hope to sharpen their understanding—here’s where the facts and
information come in, because they can help a good student get a particular
version of the story straight—and send them on their way. In this regard, I
really am a progressive educator in
that first pedagogical way I talked about, the heir of a movement that
emphasizes the plasticity of knowledge and the need for children to construct
their own working models about the way the world works, but to do so in a
social context where they are interacting with others.
And yet—and this is something I struggled
with as a form of cognitive dissonance in my own life—I am not a progressive in
the broadest, most historical, sense of the term. There are days when I feel
like I’m leading lambs to the slaughter, when I am fostering habits of thoughts
and behavior that will be singularly unhelpful in a coming world that will not
be like the one in which we are living. Sometimes I imagine that future world
as one of chaos; other times it’s one of stifling autocratic order. Either way,
I imagine former students bitterly recalling the irrelevance, or worse, of what
they learned in school.
So what keeps me going? My salvation is
my ignorance: I don’t know, I can’t
know, what will happen in the future. Call me an existentialist progressive: I
labor in the faith—in the end, that’s all it is—that something I do, something
I say, something I ask my students to read, will have some utility in their
later lives. Some sliver that will be transubstantiated into an act of
leadership—or, more simply, some act of decency—that will bring good into the
lives of that student and the broader community in which that student lives.
That’s not much to count on, I know. But sometimes it’s the counting that’s the
problem.
