Abstract
At the end of the 1800s, American intellectuals began a long if occasionally interrupted romance with progressive visions of democracy. For more than a century since then, scholars across the social sciences and humanities have found different aspects of progressive democratic practice extremely compelling, even though few if any of their hopes for social transformation have ever come to fruition.
Progressives … intended nothing less than to transform other Americans, to remake the nation’s feuding, polyglot population in their own middle-class image.
—Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent
From the beginning the American intellectual … [chose] a paradoxical vocation: a social critic committed at once to identification with the whole of the people, and an elitist whose own mores and life situation proved somewhat alienating from the very public he or she had chosen to serve.
—Leon Fink, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment
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Notes
This book contributes to an emerging line of work among historians of progressivism. See, for example, Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)
Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
Jean Anyon, “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work,” Journal of Education 162, no. 1 (1980): 67–92.
Joseph Kahne and Joel Westheimer, “Teaching Democracy: What Schools Need To Do,” Phi Delta Kappan 85, no. 1 (2003): 34–40, 57–67.
Nel Noddings, The Challenge to Care in Schools: An Alternative Approach to Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992).
David F. Labaree, The Trouble with Ed Schools (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971);
Erik Olin Wright, Approaches to Class Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
David Swartz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 109. Swartz argued that Bourdieu’s work had “little to say about what collective forms of class struggle look like” (187). And his vision of working-class culture often seems quite limited, focusing on how it is “highly constrained by primary necessities” (176). I am less conversant with more recent publications which may temper this pattern.
Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 434.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
See Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002);
Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. Edward Schils (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949);
Martin Albrow, Max Weber’s Construction of Social Theory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990);
Susan J. Hekman, Weber, the Ideal Type, and Contemporary Social Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983).
Alvin Ward Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 8. Note that Gouldner, at the end of his career, made an argument about the relationship between Marx’s theory and class background very similar to the one I am making about Dewey and the progressives in this volume, although I did not realize this until late in my writing process. Gouldner’s admittedly idiosyncratic writings will likely become more important if, as seems likely to me, Marxian theory returns to prominence in academic thought in the humanities and social sciences.
See Andrew Milner, Class (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999).
See Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007).
Michele Lamont, Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and American Upper-Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Rick Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988);
Alfred Lubrano, Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004);
Betsy Leondar-Wright, Class Matters: Cross-Class Alliance Building for Middle-Class Activists (New York: New Society Publishers, 2005). My analysis is indebted to prior writings on education and social class. Classic works by Michael Apple, Jean Anyon, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintes, Martin Carnoy and Henry Levin, and Henry Giroux, for example, informed my general thinking. It is important to acknowledge, however, that in the past few decades a focus on social class in the education literature largely disappeared in favor of a broad range of discussions of postmodernism. A few education scholars, including Apple and Richard Brosio, fought with limited success to maintain and extend our understandings of social class during this fallow period. More recently, however, questions of social class seem to be returning to prominence, as evidenced by a range of attacks on postmodernism from a Marxian perspective. Contemporary scholars like Ellen Brantlinger and Annette Lareau have also conducted powerful empirical analyses of the effects of class culture on schools and family life. All this work influenced my efforts to understand how class-based practices might inform educational scholars. See Anyon, “Hidden Curriculum,” 67–92;
Michael W. Apple, Ideology and Curriculum (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1979);
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976);
Ellen A. Brantlinger, Dividing Classes: How the Middle Class Negotiates and Rationalizes School Advantage (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2003);
Richard A. Brosio, A Radical Democratic Critique of Capitalist Education (New York: P. Lang, 1994);
Mike Cole et al., Red Chalk: On Schooling, Capitalism and Politics: Mike Cole, Dave Hill and Glenn Rikowski in Discussion with Peter McLaren (Brighton: The Institute for Education Policy Studies, 2001);
Martin Carnoy and Henry M. Levin, Schooling and Work in the Democratic State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985);
Henry A. Giroux, Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1983);
Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003);
Cameron McCarthy and Michael Apple, “Race, Class, and Gender in American Educational Research: Toward a Nonsynchronous, Parallelist Position,” in Race, Class, and Gender in American Education, ed. Lois Weis (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1988), 9–25.
Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class; Thomas R. Mahoney, “Middle-Class Experience in the United States in the Gilded Age, 1865–1900,” Journal of Urban History 31 (2005): 356–66.
See Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America.
Ibid., 363, 361, 363. See Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Men and Women of the Corporation (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Viking, 1997), 538.
Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 24.
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 66.
Joseph George Rayback, A History of American Labor (New York: Free Press, 1966).
Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class (London: Verso, 1986), 19.
See McGerr, Fierce Discontent; David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Benson, Counter Cultures; Kanter, Men and Women of the Corporation; Robin Leidner, Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
Despite critiques of Braverman’s thesis, there seems to be a general agreement that deskilling remains at least a “major tendential presence within the development of the capitalist labor process” that disproportionately affects those on the bottom. Peter Meiksins, “Labor and Monopoly Capital for the 1990s: A Review and Critique of the Labor Process Debate,” Monthly Review 46, no. 6 (1994), 5;
see James Paul Gee, Glynda A. Hull, and Colin Lankshear, The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism (Boulder, CO: West-view, 1996); Montgomery, House of Labor.
Ken Estey, A New Protestant Labor Ethic at Work (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim, 2002); Gee, Hull, and Lankshear, New Work Order.
David K. Brown, Degrees of Control: A Sociology of Educational Expansion and Occupational Credentialism (New York: Teachers College Press, 1995), 56.
Aaron Schutz, “Home Is a Prison in the Global City: The Tragic Failure of School-Based Community Engagement Strategies,” Review of Educational Research 76, no. 4 (2006): 691–743.
For recent examples, see Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children (Baltimore, MD: Brooks, 1995);
al., “Parent’s Child-Rearing Values and Beliefs in the United States and Russia: The Impact of Culture and Social Class,” Infant and Child Development 9 (2000): 105–22.
Annette Lareau, “Invisible Inequality: Social Class and Childrearing in Black Families and White Families,” American Sociological Review 67 (2002): 747.
Basil B. Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control (London: Routledge, 1971), 171.
See Anyon, “Hidden Curriculum”; Hart and Risley, Meaningful Differences; Melvin L. Kohn, and Carmi Schooler, Work and Personality: An Inquiry into the Impact of Social Stratification (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1983).
Lareau, “Social Class and the Daily Lives of Children,” Childhood 7, no. 2 (2000): 161.
Michele Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 36.
Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini, How College Affects Students: A Third Decade of Research (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2005).
Lubrano, Limbo; Michelle M. Tokarczyk and Elizabeth A. Fay, Working Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993).
Godfrey J. Ellis and Larry R. Peterson, “Socialization Values and Parental Control Techniques: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Child-Rearing,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 23 (1992): 39–45; Kohn and Schooler, Work and Personality.
James Paul Gee, “Teenagers in New Times: A New Literacy Studies Perspective,” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 43, no. 5 (2000): 412–20;
Shirley Brice Heath, Ways With Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Peggy J. Miller, Grace E. Cho, and Jeana R. Bracey, “Working-Class Children’s Experience through the Prism of Personal Storytelling,” Human Development 48, no. 3 (2005): 131.
Zygmunt Bauman, City of Fears, City of Hopes (London: Goldsmiths College, 2003), 16–17; also see Schutz, “Home Is a Prison.”
Glynda Hull, “Critical Literacy and Beyond: Lessons Learned from Students and Workers in a Vocational Program and on the Job,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 24, no. 4 (1993): 373–96;
Leidner, Fast Food, Fast Talk; Katherine S. Newman, No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City (New York: Knopf, 1999).
In fact, most of the technological advancements of the industrial revolution — the invention of the steam engine, and so forth—resulted from the experimentation and pragmatic adjustments of those who, today, would be classified as working-class mechanics. See Celeste Connor, Democratic Visions: Art and Theory of the Stieglitz Circle, 1924–1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001);
Peter T. Manicas, A History and Philosophy of the Social Sciences (New York: B. Blackwell, 1988).
Fred Rose, Coalitions Across the Class Divide: Lessons from the Labor, Peace, and Environmental Movements (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 24.
see also Partricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Allen and Unwin, 1990).
Aaron Schutz, “Rethinking Domination and Resistance: Challenging Postmodernism,” Educational Researcher 33, no. 1 (2004): 15–23.
David W. Livingstone and Peter H. Sawchuk, “Hidden Knowledge: Working-Class Capacity in the ‘Knowledge-Based Economy,’” Studies in the Education of Adults 37, no. 2 (2005): 112.
Thomas J. Gorman, “Social Class and Parental Attitudes toward Education,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 27, no. 1 (1998): 115.
Benson, Counter Cultures. also see Paul Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
Thomas J. Gorman, “Social Class and Parental Attitudes Toward Education,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 27, no. 1 (1998): 10–44;
Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Knopf, 1972);
Bernice Lott, “Cognitive and Behavioral Distancing from the Poor,” American Psychologist 57, no. 2 (2002): 100–110.
James Paul Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies (New York: Falmer, 1990).
Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control; Lisa Delpit, Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom (New York: New Press, 1995); Heath, Ways With Words.
Helen Lucey, June Melody, and Valerie Walkerdine, “Uneasy Hybrids: Psychosocial Aspects of Becoming Educationally Successful for Working-Class Young Women,” Gender and Education 15, no. 3 (2003): 285.
Peter Kaufman, “Learning to Not Labor: How Working-Class Individuals Construct Middle-Class Identities,” Sociological Quarterly 44 (2003): 481–504.
Thomas J. Gorman, “Cross-Class Perceptions,” Sociological Spectrum 20, no. 1 (2000): 104.
Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), 154, 153, 176.
See, for example, Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Norton, 1967).
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922).
Ibid.; Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
Curtis, Social Gospel; James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); McGerr, Fierce Discontent; Stromquist, Reinventing “The People.”
John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916).
Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna Camp Edwards, The Dewey School: The Laboratory School of the University of Chicago, 1896–1903 (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1936), 79, 339.
Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 76;
see also Walter Feinberg, Reason and Rhetoric: The Intellectual Foundations of 20th-Century Liberal Educational Policy (New York: Wiley, 1975).
See C. A. Bowers, The Progressive Educator and the Depression: The Radical Years (New York: Random House, 1969);
George S. Counts, Dare the School to Build a New Social Order? (New York: John Day, 1967); Feinberg, Reason and Rhetoric.
Peter S. Hlebowitsh and William G. Wraga, “Social Class Analysis in the Early Progressive Tradition,” Curriculum Inquiry 25, no. 1 (1995): 7–22. In fact, one might argue that there was a veiled paternalism in the writings of Counts and later social reconstructionists when they assumed that the traditions of the working class needed to be altered by middle-class educators.
Jane Addams, The Jane Addams Reader, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 488.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jane Addams and the Dream of American Democracy: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 124.
Mother Jones, Mother Jones Speaks, ed. Phillip Foner (New York: Monad Press, 1983), 147.
See Stuart D. Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism, 1880–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity; Montgomery, House of Labor.
Estey, Protestant Labor Ethic at Work; James Reinhart, “Transcending Taylorism and Fordism?” in The Critical Study of Work, ed. Rick Baldoz, Charles Kroeber, and Philip Kraft (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2001), 179–93.
As other scholars have noted, the transcendentalists deeply influenced collaborative democrats like Dewey as well. See David A. Granger, John Dewey, Robert Pirsig, and the Art of Living: Revisioning Aesthetic Education (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006);
Naoko Saito, The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).
The most important work on the 1920s personalists is Casey N. Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990);
the best book for understanding the personalist perspective of the 1960s is Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (New York: Vintage, 1962);
and the best book on the free schools movement is Ron Miller, Free Schools, Free People: Education and Democracy After the 1960s (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).
William E. Leuchtenberg, Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 151.
See Margaret Naumburg, The Child and the World: Dialogues in Modern Education (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1928);
Caroline Pratt and Jessie Stanton, Before Books (New York: Adelphi, 1926);
A. S. Neill, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (New York: Hart, 1960).
Linda Jill Markowitz, Worker Activism After Successful Union Organizing (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000);
Judith Stepan-Norris, “The Making of Union Democracy,” Social Forces 76, no. 2 (1997): 475–510.
Donald C. Reitzes and Dietrich C. Reitzes, The Alinsky Legacy: Alive and Kicking (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1987), 36.
Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (New York: Vintage, 1969), 133–34.
Mark R. Warren, Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 336.
Edward T. D. Chambers and Michael A. Cowan, Roots for Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice (New York: Continuum, 2003).
Lichterman, The Search for Political Community: American Activists Reinventing Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
Rose, Coalitions. Also see David Croteau, Politics and the Class Divide: Working People and the Middle-Class Left (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995);
Linda Stout, Bridging the Class Divide and Other Lessons for Grassroots Organizing (Boston: Beacon, 1996);
Leondar-Wright, Class Matters; Stephen Hart, Cultural Dilemmas of Progressive Politics: Styles of Engagement Among Grassroots Activists (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001);
Eric H. F. Law, The Wolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb: A Spirituality for Leadership in a Multicultural Community (Atlanta: Chalice, 1993).
Also see Dennis Shirley, Community Organizing for Urban School Reform (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997); and Warren, Dry Bones Rattling.
Laurence R. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).
John R. Commons, “Discussion of the President’s Address,” Publications of the American Economic Association 3, no. 1 (1890), 62–88, 287–88; in education see Counts, Dare the Schools.
John R. Commons, “Discussion of the President’s Address,” Publications of the American Economic Association 3, no. 1 (1890), 62–88, 287–88; in education see Counts, Dare the Schools.
Brosio, Radical Democratic Education; Aaron Schutz, “Teaching Freedom? Postmodern Perspectives,” Review of Educational Research 70, no. 2 (2000): 215–51; Schutz, “Rethinking Domination and Resistance.”
Christine A. Ogren, The American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 68.
David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 72;
see also Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
Tyack, One Best System; Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum: 1893–1958 (New York: Routledge, 1995).
See Michelle Fine, Lois Weis, and Linda C. Powell, “Communities of Difference: A Critical Look at Desegregated Spaces Created for and by Youth,” Harvard Educational Review 67, no. 2 (1997): 247–61;
James W. Fraser, Reading, Writing, and Justice: School Reform as if Democracy Matters (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997);
David T. Sehr, Education for Public Democracy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), to name a few. The point is not that no thoughtful (as opposed to hatchet job) critiques of Deweyan democracy exist. Instead, the problem is that his general vision is so deeply embedded in the psyches of educational scholars that alternatives rarely emerge.
Michael W. Apple and James A. Beane, Democratic Schools (Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1995). See Brosio, Radical Democratic Education.
See Collins, Black Feminist Thought; William F. Tate and Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Critical Race Theory and Education: History, Theory, and Implications,” Review of Research in Education 22 (1997): 195–250.
Kathleen Knight Abowitz, “Getting Beyond Familiar Myths: Discourses of Service Learning and Critical Pedagogy,” Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies 21, no. 1 (1999): 63–77;
Jane Mansbridge et al., “Norms of Deliberation: An Inductive Study,” Journal of Public Deliberation 2, no. 1 (2006): 1–47;
Lynn M. Sanders, “Against Deliberation,” Political Theory 25, no. 3 (1997): 347–76.
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© 2010 Aaron Schutz
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Schutz, A. (2010). Social Class and Social Action. In: Social Class, Social Action, and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113572_2
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