Memory: Schooling, part C

I went over my memories of grade school here and high school here. Completing the set, I’ve already written about my college experiences here.

So that’s it. I’ve made an honest effort to lay out my formative experiences and biases. Now back to education history proper. In one week, school is over. Plan is to devote 3-4 hours a day to drafting the book, and 3-4 hours a day to preparing for next year. Having to herd cats for nine months has, I believe, kicked my focus and discipline up a notch. This time, for sure!

Education History Book: Update

Last summer, I had a conversation with a man who has both published a bunch of books and runs a small publishing house. After describing the book – what might be called a popular history of Catholic schooling in America – and asking him to talk me out of it, he instead said I should definitely write it and he wanted to see it when it was ready.

Oh, well. Gave it a shot.

He suggested that there were several publishers that would be interested and better fits for the subject matter, but added that, if none of them would take it, he would be interested in publishing it.

So, here I am. School ends May 20th. The next mandatory school event is the last full week of July. So I theoretically have two months in there to put together a draft. I’ve been rereading some of the source materials, and my blog posts on them, to get the information back fresh in mind.

Boundaries of the German Confederation with Prussia in blue, Austria in yellow, and the rest in grey. Via Wikipedia

I’d really like to stick to the original plan: write 2 books, one a short and popular history, footnoted and referenced and all that, but written to appeal to a non-academic reader. Then, the magnum opus, as long as it needs to be, with all the references and footnotes and rabbit holes spelled out. e.g., Dwight’s tour of Europe, at best a footnote in the popular history, would be spelled out in the context of Fichte’s reforms of the education system. (Dwight notes that speech in German social circles was very circumspect – there were plenty of topics it was not safe to discuss in public. Hmmm – the people implementing a system of schooling designed to destroy free will in the pupils and turn them into loyal patriotic Germans obedient without question to their superiors doesn’t favor free speech? Imagine my surprise.) Also, the details of Fichte’s insane philosophy and how it is expanded on by Hegel, the whole messianic schooling movement as a part of the intolerant Puritan obsession with control, the fundamental insanity of the Great Awakenings, how these movements formed Catholic converts Hecker and Brownson into wildly optimistic Pre-Millennialists; how this optimism persisted through the 1950s (at least) in the Church in America, leading to incredible blunders in the Church’s relationship to politics in general and the NEA in particular – these things will be touched upon in the popular book, but deserve a full treatment somewhere – thus, the second book. If I live long enough.

I got my work cut out for me. May God grant me the health, energy, and focus needed to get this project done!

The Report of the Committee of 10

(Obviously, neglected the blog to do, you know, actual work. I’ll try to post a little over the Christmas Break.)

I was on hold for about 70 minutes, trying to get through to a government bureaucrat, and so I started reading what was handy – the 1893 Report of the Committee of 10, established by the National Education Association to investigate and make recommendations about high school education in America.

Yet again, I read this stuff so you don’t have to.

(Aside: I had purchased for 99 cents the Kindle version of some best selling SciFi adventure novel by some guy who has sold millions of books, who I’d never heard of. I got maybe 4 chapters in, during which we have an epic event, a dangerous negotiation, a romantic conflict, and a helicopter landing on the balcony of a Third-World dictator’s palace during the middle of a formal state dinner to sweep our protagonist away for a super secret government mission – and I couldn’t take it, opened the Report mentioned above, and – yep, I actually enjoy reading the bureaucratic effluvia of late 19th century ‘educators’ more than popular, over the top, thrill a minute SciFi. But I’m guessing YOU wouldn’t.)

in 1892, the NEA proposed to determine how best to standardize high school education, and set up a Committee to look into it. I’m next putting up some lists – it pays to think about the people involved (and not involved), the subjects they were interested in (and those they weren’t) and the questions they asked.

For example, Charles William Eliot, the Chairman of the Committee of 10, was responsible for turning Harvard into a modern research university, after the model developed by Fichte and von Humboldt and embodied in the University of Berlin. To recap: Harvard was founded by Puritan fanatics who came to America explicitly to establish a Calvinist theocracy. Harvard was their seminary, expected to churn out both religious and political leaders, insofar as those two roles were distinct. By around 1800, Unitarians had taken over. Over the course of the 19th century, even a Unitarian’s feeble grasp of religion had failed, and Harvard was effectively run by the then-current version of ‘spiritual but not religious’ crowd.

The original purpose of Harvard, however, never faltered: to produce righteous leaders, presumed to superior to all others, to enforce their theocracy upon the land. Fichte certainly believed this as well, with his program to simply seize all children so that they could be educated properly by the state outside the baleful influence of family, community, and church. So he can be assumed, I think, to have bought what the Prussians were selling.

My man William Torey Harris is there. As the US Commissioner of Education and the publisher and editor of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, he pushed Hegelianism as the only proper philosophy. “Its contributors promoted Hegel’s concept of time and events as part of a universal plan, a working out of an eternal historical dialectic.” He has elsewhere expressed his ideas of what constitutes an ideal high school education:

The secondary education takes up human learning and continues it along the same lines, namely : 1, inorganic nature; 2, organic nature; 3, literature (the heart); 4, grammar and logic (the intellect); and 5, history (the will). Algebra deals with general numbers, while Arithmetic has definite numbers to operate with. Geometry and physics continue inorganic nature, while natural history continues the study already commenced in geography. Then come Greek and Latin, and here is opened up a great field of study into the embryology of our civilization. In the dead language* we have the three great threads running through the history of human progress. The Greek, with its literature and aesthetic art and its philosophy, showing the higher forms of human freedom in contrast with the Egyptian, which showed only the struggle for freedom and never the man separated from the animal and the inorganic world. The Roman, with the continual gaze upon the will of man, seeks the true forms of contracts and treaties and corporations, whereby one man may combine with another, and it essays the conquering of men and reducing them to obedience to civil law, not only external conquest but internal conquest as well. The Hebrew thread is the religious one, which we recognize in the celebration of worship one day each week and in the various holy days. We acknowledge this the most essential thread of our civilization. So, with the secondary education we begin to get the embryology of our forms of life.

Harris, the Philosophy of Education

Harris championed both a blank slate theory of education and confidence that the traditional approach unconsciously reflects the will of the Spirit as it unfolds itself in History. Thus, every single child gets the same education at the the same speed, with the goal that, while their individuality is subsumed in the synthesis of their interests and the community’s interests, they regain some agency as properly trained Hegelians moving the world forward on the right side of History. Something like that.

And so on.

Here is that Committee, per Wikipedia:

The committee was largely composed of representatives of higher education.

• Charles William Eliot, President of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts Chairman
• William T. Harris, Commissioner of Education, Washington, D.C.
• James B. Angell, President of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
• John Tetlow, Head Master of the Girls’ High School, Boston, Massachusetts
• James M. Taylor, President of Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York
• Oscar D. Robinson, Principal of the High School, Albany, New York
• James H. Baker, President of the University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado
• Richard Henry Jesse, President of the University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri
• James C. Mackenzie, Head Master of the Lawrenceville School, Lawrenceville, New Jersey
• Henry Churchill King, Professor in Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio

These people then set up 9 subcommittees, called Conferences, to look into each of the 9 subjects or areas that the Committee of 10 thought important:

1. Latin;
2. Greek;
3. English;
4. Other Modern Languages;
5. Mathematics
6. Physics, Astronomy, and Chemistry;
7. Natural History (Biology, including Botany, Zoology, and Physiology)
8. History, Civil Government, and Political Economy;
9. Geography (Physical Geography, Geology, and Meteorology) .

The councils were to answer 11 questions:

1. In the school course of study extending approximately from the age of six years to eighteen years —a course including the periods of both elementary and secondary instruction —at what age should the study which is the subject of the Conference be first introduced?
2. After it is introduced, how many hours a week for how many years should be devoted to it?
3. How many hours a week for how many years should be devoted to it during the last four years of the complete course ; that is, during the ordinary high school period ?
4. What topics, or parts, of the subject may reasonably be covered during the whole course?
5. What topics, or parts, of the subject may best be reserved for the last four years?
6. In what form and to what extent should the subject enter into college requirements for admission ? Such questions as the sufficiency of translation at sight as a test of knowledge of a language, or the superiority of a laboratory examination in a scientific subject to a written examination on a text-book, are intended to be suggested under this head by the phrase “in what form.”
7. Should the subject be treated differently for pupils who are going to college, for those who are going to a scientific school, and for those who, presumably, are going to neither?
8. At what stage should this differentiation begin, if any be recommended ?
9. Can any description be given of the best method of teaching this subject throughout the school course ?
10. Can any description be given of the best mode of testing attainments in this subject at college admission examinations
11. For those cases in which colleges and universities permit a division of the admission examination into a preliminary and a final examination, separated by at least a year, can the best limit between the preliminary and final examinations be approximately defined?

I got through the abstract or summary and am now working on the reports from the individual Conferences. Interesting stuff so far:

• The summary goes to great length to emphasize their surprise and delight at the near-unanimity of the Conferences in their recommendations. The lady doth protest too much – you mean, your hand-selected Committee’s hand-selected Conferences are all singing from the same hymnal? Shocking!
• The Conferences unanimously agreed that no consideration should be given to whether a student intended to go on to college or a ‘scientific’ school – train them all the same. Blank slate thinking. Specialty schools, such as law, medicine, and engineering schools, are weirdly dismissed in the sense that it seems it was beneath the dignity of the Committee to show any interest in what such schools might want in high school graduates.
• The Committee sent out a questionnaire to 200 high schools, asking about curriculum. They got 40 responses. Think about that – the NEA sets up a committee headed by the President of Harvard. This committee selects 200 high schools to survey – out of how many thousands of high schools in America? And 80% of those selected high schools blow them off. So, in 1892, how much weight did the NEA and the president of Harvard actually carry among ‘educators’?
• The Committee proposed not one, but 4 courses of study: The Classical Model, the Latin-Scientific, the Modern Languages, and the English.

• In order to do any of this, a lot more needed to be expected of grade schools. Latin, for example, should ideally start around 6th grade, and Greek one grade later. The Committee ends up recommending reform of the entire K-12 enterprise.
• To pull any of this off, the Committee recognizes the need for many more, and much better trained, teachers. Huh, imagine that. This is an implicit criticism of and an attack on Catholic schools and one-room schools, none of which had the resources to do this sort of education even if they wanted to. But starting with this report, some diocese tried, leading to elite Catholic high schools in several cities. But the model of religious sisters from the Old Country sacrificing to teach immigrant children – the foundation of all parish schools – meant that kids were being trained by the wrong teachers: ones who had not been processed through the Normal Schools beloved by the NEA and the US Commission of Education.

And a bunch more stuff! The Committee noted that while work remained to be done, there were plenty of high schools in America that achieved, or nearly achieved, the goals the Committee laid out. Think about that, and weep: these schools turned out high school grads who were competent in AT LEAST Latin and Greek, had AT LEAST a good start in German and French, were well read in the Classics, and knew how to write decent English. AND colleges expected their applicants to demonstrate competence in these areas to gain admittance. How many of our current Masters and PhD holders have this level of education? Dumbing us down hardly covers it.

I’ll try to do a more thorough analysis once I get through all the individual Conferences reports. The Committee of 10 was hugely influential, and its ideas on a uniform, super-high quality education for every kid were used to beat down the opposition – until Dewey’s kinder, gentler, commie-revolutionary- producing model took over, producing the angry, ignorant mediocracies with which we are all familiar.

Thoughts/Last July Update

Taking a brief break from headmastering.

A. The rental house is proving quite comfortable, if a little tight (it’s about 2/3 the size of our last house). One oddity: the owners don’t want us messing with the landscaping, which, IMHO, could use a little messing with. But I get it: their typical renter is not likely to improve matters.

For me, this means there are not too many possible spots to plant some vegitables. One obvious spot: a 4′ x 4′ hole in the pavement along a side yard, which seems to have been paved at some point as RV parking, maybe. Don’t know why this hole exists, but:

Took some scrap particleboard, lathered it in water sealer, let it dry for a few days, and – we’ll see. Not a long-term solution. Those are two tomatoes and a red bell pepper. Room for one more tomato?

We will have 4 months – August, September, October, and November – for tomatoes to grow. It’s been running about 100F during the day (but, thankfully, cools to around 60F at night) so good tomato weather. Shouldn’t be a frost before December… Anyway, worth a shot.

The little darlings.

B. Took some cuttings from our favorite trees before we sold the Concord house – the lemon in the backyard, the fig and Mineola in the front. The figs are quite happy:

Got one fig moved to a bigger pot, about 5 more to transplant.

The citrus – not so much. This is the third round of cuttings. All but one of the first set of cuttings died (took me far too long to get them into soil – citrus seems far less tolerant than the figs). Maybe a couple of the second set survived. Maybe. But the third set, which has only been potted for a couple weeks, seems good so far.

Other figs in the front; citrus in the back in the plastic tub. This is all on the back porch/patio.

I read that citrus must be grafted onto certified disease-free rootstock. I’ll look into that sometime early next year. For now, if I can just keep them alive until then, I will consider it a success.

All these little trees, or at least the best of them, get planted on the homestead – once we find and purchase one.

C. Attended the Chesterton Schools conference in Milwaukee. Great people, really fired up about education and especially Catholicism. Got to spend a little time with Dale Alquist, the world’s leading expert on Chesterton, founder of the American Chesterton Society and the Chesterton Schools Network. Very nice man. I gave him every opportunity to talk me out of writing a book about the history of American Catholic Education, but, alas! he simply refused. Rather, he even encouraged me. So now I guess I’m going to spend the summer trying to get that thing finished.

D. Now for something completely different. I’ve been thinking a lot about disreputable professions and Vo-Tech schooling. Traditionally, education, and especially higher education, was concerned chiefly with passing on a learned culture and all the skills needed to maintain it. It was a group effort: with the possible exception of the occasional Aquinas or Abelard, no one person could carry very much of that burden. Thus, while all scholars prior to modern times were expected to have a broad knowledge of the works of their fathers going back at least to the Greeks and Israelites – the Great Books part of the education – only the most brilliant and dogged became true masters of more than a tiny subset of All That. At least, that’s how the story looks to me.

But then the Research University was invented and realized at the University of Berlin in 1811 with Fichte as its first Rector. The purpose of higher education was shifted with dizzying rapidity from passing on and possibly contributing to a rich and awesome patrimony to ‘moving the world forward’ through focused research. By the end of the 19th century, every American university declared itself a Research University. The pathetic little colleges that tried to keep to the more ancient tradition were eventually staffed entirely by products of the research universities, and thus wouldn’t be able to tell you the difference except by sneering at our primitive and long-obviated ancestors.

But research doesn’t train up much of anything except future ‘researchers’. So where are your professions coming from? The original answer was generally some sort of apprenticeship. A wannabe lawyer ‘read’ law with an existing lawyer, and hung out his shingle once he became convinced he could do it on his own. (Abraham Lincoln famously declined to do this. Instead, he read the lawbooks on his own, then took half a year off to learn the first 6 books of Euclid so that he would know what ‘demonstrated’ meant. He seemed to do OK.)

Soon, what we now call vo-tech arose to help fill this need. For manual trades, vo-tech seems mostly to formalize and layer on some theory to the apprenticeship model. A would-be welder or diesel repair mechanic goes to school, where experts show him how to do it, and then certify him. This all helps him get that first job, after which he’s on his own.

Here’s where things get interesting. The more white-collar trades are also, you may have noticed, the most generally mistrusted and despised. When Dick the Butcher says “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” the groundlings laughed. If any lawyers were present, they were in better seats, and could immediately start in on doing what they do best: explaining away the clear implications of that line. While Dick was a murderer and scoundrel, he was saying what a lot of people were thinking: lawyers exist to protect their wealthy patrons and enrich themselves. The whole legal system was rotten; it is not for nothing that Bolt calls Thomas More the only honest judge in England in A Man For All Seasons, a play set only a couple generations before Shakespeare wrote Henry VI.

A century and a half of white collar Vo-Tech – teacher’s colleges, law schools, medical schools, business schools – have had as their chief mission to get people to forget how despised the guild members they anointed were. Read any early American accounts of schools – for every one where the teacher was beloved, you’ll find 10 where he was despised by the students, and the feeling was mutual. Doctors were used as a last resort, as the chances he would help were slimmer than the chances he would take your money and speed your death. Madame Bouverie contains one of many accounts of medical hubris.

And lawyers? Do we need to even go there? The institutions that were created to smooth over the public’s distrust gave themselves fancy names, established tests and certifications, and resolved to pretend that, no, it was not the professions themselves that were the problem, but the lack of exactly that oversight and certification that they, the high-end vo-tech schools provided.

Right. It is similar to the creation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – what a grand name! – as an attempt to gloss over the crude fact that the people involved in making movies are known to be panderers and prostitutes. Not ALL of them, of course! No no no! It’s not the profession that’s the problem! Really! Look at our shiny statues and grand parties! And definitely don’t look at the personal lives of the powerful.

So business people built grand bank buildings, temples to the solidity of the money trades, because people know it’s all a game. Teachers are processed and certified and join a guild, insulated from the products of their teaching. Rarely is the failure of the schools allowed to be laid at the feet of the people whose job it is to make them succeed. Lawyers and judges dress funny and insist on their dignity, like porn stars who let it be known that they might go through all sorts of motions for the camera, but they draw the line someplace. Beyond that line lies shame, but it is art on their side of the line, no matter where they draw it. Doctors create gauntlets for future doctors to run through, so that they can remain proud of their 20 hour shifts during residency and downplay that all they do, in the end, is follow protocols created by somebody else, without the agency to even acknowledge their lack of agency.

And yet in that very class (the powerful – ed.) there may arise good men, and worthy of all admiration they are, for where there is great power to do wrong, to live and to die justly is a hard thing, and greatly to be praised, and few there are who attain to this. Such good and true men, however, there have been, and will be again, at Athens and in other states, who have fulfilled their trust righteously; and there is one who is quite famous all over Hellas, Aristeides, the son of Lysimachus. But, in general, great men are also bad, my friend.

Plato, Gorgias, near the end.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

G. K. Chesterton

Education History Book Review – Downs: Henry Barnard

The book on the left

Robert B. Downs short 1977 biography of Henry Barnard is a hagiography. Barnard is a saint of American state schooling, second only, if at all, to Horace Mann. As such, the dogmas of the compulsory state education church are simply assumed, and any dissent is simply heresy or unenlightened ignorance. No ink is wasted examining the possibility Barnard’s opponents might have had a point. How could they? Public schooling is assumed to be a total good with no downside whatsoever.

Downs himself was a librarian and author, with biographies of Mann and Pestalozzi and pile of other books to his name. His life in some ways parallels Barnard’s, as he travelled around the world consulting on various library projects, collecting honors and honorary degrees along the way. Barnard was the mid-19th century’s go-to education expert in America, and as such also got in a lot of travel and honors.

In the longer, more recent biography of Barnard by Edith Nye MacMillun lightly reviewed here, Barnard doesn’t quite come off as the hero portrayed by Downs. Here’s one reviewer’s take on MacMullen’s book:

Barnard represented an important social type: the nineteenth-century gentleman reformer. The type was international, as common in Victorian Britain or among the Continental bourgeoisie as among the American Whigs. Barnard’s merits and defects were those of the amateur: He mustered enthusiasm and eloquence, but flitted from job to job too readily instead of persevering with a given problem. Barnard was influenced by the ideas of the Swiss Pestalozzi, the Frenchman Guizot, and the British utilitarians, but most of all by the example of Prussian educational reformers. His biographer recognizes this transatlantic frame of reference but tells us little about the European ideas and practices that appealed to Barnard, or how applicable they were to American conditions.

Daniel W Howe, Teacher’s College Record

MacMullen allows herself to wonder why Barnard’s name was removed from a building at Yale, his alma mater, while Mann still has dozens if not hundreds of schools and facilities named after him. Mann’s legend remains intact; Barnard has simply become one more overrated or at least unknown 19th century dude who got a building named after him but is otherwise forgettable and forgotten. I don’t know if anything has changed in this regard over the decades since MacMullen’s book.

Barnard is that ‘gentleman reformer’ coming out of a Puritan world, where there is one right way to do anything, and our self-appointed betters will tell us little people what that is. At least Barnard truly was well educated, although he failed to take the lesson from *how* he came to be well-educated: at Yale, he joined societies and volunteered for position that gave him access to libraries. He read extensively in Greek, Latin, and English – outside of school. Yet he proposes rules for other people that are completely at odds with how he, himself, got educated. He wants graded classroom, compulsory attendance, ‘normal’ teachers – the products of normal schools, meant to produce standardize teachers.

The elitism is bracing. Barnard of course assumes he is special, and that of course he can tell the little people how to do it. For their own good and all. Lest we imagine this is just the appropriate response of a recognized expert, and that we should simply do what he says as we would follow the instructions of an auto mechanic or engineer, Barnard, in the same manner as all other educationists, asserts as obvious that education is a moral issue with moral goals. He, like Fichte, Mann, and our modern ‘educators’ are not concerned (much) with the three R’s – they want to improve us morally. My auto mechanic wants to make my car run, not improve my character. And he really does make my car run better; modern education has no such practical track record.

Finally, one observation about Barnard’s career made by both biographers: whenever he obtained a position where he needed to satisfy the reasonable expectations other people – teacher, college president, head of the US Department of Education – he didn’t last long, nor make much of a lasting impression. Downs, to be sure, credits him with more achievement than MacMullen, but even he does so with apologies – if only Barnard’s health had been better! If only he’d gotten more cooperation. MacMullen points out that a young Barnard knew how to charm people and navigate political situations, a skill he seemed less and less inclined to use as he aged. Thus, after his brief stint as US Commissioner of Education, where such skills were essential, he ‘retired’ as a still fairly young man to editing journals. A journal editor is not answerable to anyone except insofar as he needs their money as subscribers and patrons. Barnard largely failed there as well – he never made enough money from selling his publications to cover what it cost him to produce them. He burned through his substantial inheritance subsidizing his publishing career, and had to beg friends and supporters to keep it going for the last few years. He never took any responsibility for his failure to make ends meet, nor changed his approach in response to what potential subscribers might want to read. He knew what they should want to read!

Puritans of whatever religious beliefs, millennialists awaiting the glorious perfection of man here and now, seem, then as now, to be frustrated and baffled when the world doesn’t conform to their plans for it.

Reading in Education History So You Don’t Have To: 2 Books – an 1870 Report & a Bio of Barnard

Just received this book:

Very preliminary thoughts, I’ve just started reading this. ULAN Press prints public domain books as reasonably nice paperbacks, including, as here, things of so little general interest I doubt they sold 1,000 copies. This book cover goes all “…” right before naming the year of this report – but then below shows 1890. OK – 1890, the 3rd year of the long reign of William Torrey Harris as US Commissioner of Education, smack in the middle of the peak turmoil among Catholics, who wanted a) very, very much to be accepted as Americans, and b) not to have their kids indoctrinated in anti-Catholic beliefs in the public schools. Thousands of parish schools were built during this period, anathemas were (unofficially) leveled against those Catholics who could send their kids to parish schools and didn’t – while Bishop Ireland was giving speeches before the National Education Association on how Catholics needed to go to public schools, expressing, I imagine, the views of sophisticated Catholic Americans, who found their more vehement coreligionists more than a little embarrassing…

So I ponied up to get this 579 page Report, thinking it would provide invaluable background materials for that crucial period, then eagerly crack it open to discover:

Um… That’s not what I wanted. Typo? Just what happens when people are printing small runs of low-margin, nearly unsellable books? I was disappointed.

Upon reflection, I decided to keep and read it. Education history from right after the Civil War up to about 1880 I don’t know much about, yet. The first wave of passion for state funded compulsory schools hit America in the 1820s and 30s, when American young men returned from Prussia after seeing Fichte’s ideas as realized by von Humboldt in the public schools there.

(One thing I need to investigate: how much time, if any, did these slumming scions of ambitious Americans spend in actual Prussian schoolrooms, versus how much time they spent hearing about how wonderful they were at Prussian universities? The contemporary French politician Victor Cousins begins his glowing and haranguing report of the Prussian schools by saying that he meant to spend some months investigating these institutions but ended up only having a couple weeks to look into them – yet he promptly writes hundreds of influential pages on the experience, which are promptly translated into English in America, where they are again very influential. Allowing for early 19th century travel times, how much time, really, could Cousins have spent in real classrooms? Any? Upon such slender fantasies are our educational edifices built.)

The influx of Irish immigrants in the 1840s and 50s as a result of the Great Famine flamed the Know-Nothings and helped make the idea of forcing kids into public schools more popular. Pre-war tensions and the War Between the States absorbed attention for the next decade and a half, and, in its aftermath, Northern educationists flooded the South and set up schools. Any local opposition could be ignored.

Where the trees have fallen, the weeds grow. What had been some fairly strong opposition to the notion of state-controlled mandatory schooling in the first half of the 1800s seems to have disappeared in the enthusiasms and chaos of the post war years – again, I don’t really know yet, but it seems to be true. Except in Catholic circles, where the obvious Protestant and anti-Catholic biases in the public schools and among their supporters inspired Catholics to found their own schools.

So let’s dig in to some background to this report:

Founded in March 2, 1867, the US Department of Education was first headed up by Henry Barnard, a man who spent exactly 3 unhappy months as a teacher at the age of 20 – and yet, after Mann, is the most influential ‘educationist’ of the period. I’m not expecting much from Wikipedia, but note the rather vague assumption of a life spent improving things in Barnard’s bio, without any concrete examples. A lot of “reorganized and reformed,” and “founded” stuff, not a lot of anything that clearly made life better for anyone:

Henry Barnard was born in Hartford, Connecticut on January 24, 1811. He attended Wilbraham & Monson Academy and graduated from Yale University in 1830. In 1835, he was admitted to the Connecticut bar. In 1837–1839, he was a member of the Connecticut House of Representatives, effecting in 1838 the passage of a bill, drafted and introduced by himself, which provided for “the better supervision of the common schools”, and established a board of “commissioners of common schools” in the state. He was the secretary of the board from 1838 until its abolition in 1842, and during this time worked indefatigably to reorganize and reform the common school system of the state, thus earning a national reputation as an educational reformer.

In 1843, he was appointed by the governor of Rhode Island agent to examine the public schools of the state, and recommended improvements; and his work resulted in the reorganization of the school system two years later. From 1845 to 1849, he was the first commissioner of public schools in the state, and his administration was marked by a decided step in educational progress. In 1845, Barnard established the first “Rhode Island Teachers Institute” at Smithville Seminary.

Returning to Connecticut, from 1851 to 1855, he was “superintendent of common schools”, and principal of the Connecticut State Normal School at New Britain, Connecticut.

In 1852, Barnard was offered the newly created position of President of the University of Michigan, but he declined. From 1859 to 1860, he was chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and agent of the board of regents of the normal school fund; in 1866 he was president of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland; and from 1867 to 1870 he was the first United States Commissioner of Education, and in this position he laid the foundation for the subsequent work of the Bureau of Education.

Barnard’s chief service to the cause of education, however, was rendered as the editor, from 1855 to 1881, of the American Journal of Education, the thirty-one volumes of which are a veritable encyclopedia of education, one of the most valuable compendiums of information on the subject ever brought together through the agency of any one man. He also edited from 1838 to 1842, and again from 1851 to 1854, the Connecticut Common School Journal, and from 1846 to 1849 the Journal of the Rhode Island Institute of Instruction.

Servant of the Mouth of Sauron. Yes, for one year, he was President of my alma mater. Imagine.

Compare and contrast: his Italian contemporary John Bosco (1815 -1888) founded schools where thousands upon thousands of orphaned and abandoned boys were taken in, fed, clothed, and housed, given a first-rate education, and help finding apprenticeships and jobs. Hundreds of testimonials survive from the men who were taken in by Don Bosco. Then, inspired by the great saint, hundreds of other such homes/schools were founded around the world. Thousands of men and women dedicated themselves to his cause. Hundreds of Bosco schools are still around (even if the modern versions are but faint shadows of their founder’s passion – a high bar, it must be granted).

So – where are the testimonials for Barnard? Maybe in here?

Dude had a righteous beard. One fun thing to do: look for writings by former students praising their primary schooling. You can find some for Bosco and indeed for many one room schools. Paeans to PS 145 or Woodrow Wilson High School are – unknown. Be true to your school, just like you would to your girl!

Reading the Wikipedia bio caused me to grab off my shelf this more detailed bio. I think I also picked up a shorter one, too, but I didn’t see it in the 30 seconds I devoted to looking. So, let’s see, skimming this biography:

• Son of a sea captain in Hartford
• Graduated from Yale at 20
• Described as “Fastidious and slightly snobbish.”
• Taught school – for 3 months. That’s it for classroom experience for his entire life. He didn’t like it and wasn’t good at it.
• Spun his wheels for a couple years, dabbling in politics, law, and intellectual pursuits
• Toured D.C. and the nearby South
• Admitted to the Connecticut bar at the age of 23
• Went to Europe. Unlike his contemporaries, merely as a tourist on daddy’s dime. (Barnard comments in passing that it would be good if the immigration of the ‘bellicose” Irish to America could be stopped.)
• Had enough money that he never really needed to work.
• Elected to the Connecticut legislature in 1837, age 26

As a legislator:

He secured passage of a bill creating a board of commissioners to supervise the state’s faltering common schools, was appointed to the board, and in 1838 became its executive secretary.

Barnard, who found the schools poorly maintained and attended, wanted public education “good enough for the best and cheap enough for the poorest.” He believed that thorough moral training in the common schools was the surest safeguard of the community’s happiness. An intensive campaign featuring public meetings and teachers’ institutes, the creation of the Connecticut Common School Journal, which he edited, and a series of annual reports describing school conditions and suggesting remedies yielded legislation reorganizing the schools. But in 1842 a hostile assembly disbanded the board as “a useless expense.”

Your Dictionary Biography

Note:

• “Moral training” – What are we to think of a Yale man who answers the eternal question “can virtue be taught” with a quick “yes” and presents himself as just the man to do it? We all need to get over the idea that public schooling was created to educate in any merely intellectual sense. The movement has always had at its core the idea that the state should empower “good” people to intervene to make sure everybody turns out correctly moral. The idea that such a thing as moral education cannot except accidentally happen through schooling seems never to have occurred to these folks.
• “A useless expense” – An example of the antebellum opposition to state education initiatives. Of course, these hard-headed Yankees are the bad guys in this story, frustrating the pure and holy goals of the educationists. It’s way past time to ask if they were not, in fact, on to something. Barnard, so far in my light skim of this biography, comes off as a prissy elitist who was afraid to make enemies and retreated to writing whenever the going got tough – he lasted 3 months as a teacher, 9 months as President of St. John’s College, less than three years as US Commissioner of Education, throwing out ideas and giving speeches – but decades as editor and publisher of the American Journal of Education.

Barnard was succeeded as US Commissioner of Education by John Eaton (1829-1906), who held the office from 1870 to 1886. He was the man responsible for the Report with which this essay began. Another fascinating character, who later went on to become prominent in the

Eaton was educated at the Thetford Academy, which claims 7 prominent educators among its early graduates. The Academy was founded to fulfill a clause of the Vermont Constitution calling for the establishment of free secondary schools – 26 years after that constitution became law. Again, note the educational enthusiasm of the leadership seems to exceed the interests of the people.

The regulations require the students to regard all the proprieties of a sober, industrious and enlightened religious community. The teachers aim not to teach a sectarian creed, but to inculcate the great principles of morality and religion.”

Thetford Academy Website

I quote the above to illustrate something striking about early 18th century America that may be hard to grasp for us moderns: it was so close to possible to pretend that all the serious early American religious groups – Puritans/Presbyterians and their traditional enemies, the Episcopalians, as well as the spin offs such as Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, and Unitarians – agreed on morality that people generally did pretend it. Lewis’s concept of ‘Mere Christianity’ is the final expression of this fantasy.

This idea of essential agreement on a biblically-based morality, so close to true at least early on, was part of the foundation of the education of our future educationists. Once reality kicks in, and one sees that real people often disagree vehemently on what constitutes good morals, the options are to start another war on the heretics, or to jettison all areas of moral disagreement from the set of essential morals upon which we all agree.

America has embraced the power of ‘and’. The Civil War, Prohibition, and the current woke attempts to exterminate the unwashed are the wars; we’ve ‘compromised’ on morality to the point where buggering children is a lifestyle choice.

Barnard, when he toured Europe, commendably developed a taste for good wine. Would Eaton approve? Barnard’s father plied the New England-Caribbean trade routes, where American goods were typically paid for in rum produced by slaves on sugar plantations. The rum was then sold to Americans.. Well? Everybody cool with that? Our immunity to cognitive dissonance is nothing new, it’s just reached a new apex.

Eaton was an ordained Presbyterian minister and educationist, who entered the war as a Union chaplain and rose to brevet brigadier general for his work among the black freemen, work he continued until discharged from the army. He was a big part of the educational carpet bagging after the war, where New Englanders descended upon the South to found schools. In addition to his decade and a half as the US Commissioner of Education, he acted as President of several colleges including one in Alaska, and inspector of schools in Puerto Rico. He seems to have been very effective building up the education bureaucracy in DC and writing reports.

Busy man. Later in life, Eaton also was President of the American Society of Religious Education. A bit of digging around on the web reveals little about this society at the time Eaton would have been involved in it, except that the goal was to have biblical morality taught in the schools. Perhaps the passionate push for state controlled compulsory schooling would be best seen as yet another sect sprung from the 2nd Great Awakening.

The Second Great Awakening led to a period of antebellum social reform and an emphasis on salvation by institutions.

New religious movements emerged during the Second Great Awakening, such as Adventism, Dispensationalism, and the Latter Day Saint movement.

Wikipedia, of all things

I mean, check it out, just using Wikipedia’s three examples of new religious movements above: Adventism is the belief that the Christ is coming very soon; Dispensationalism believes the next (or perhaps current) dispensation is the 1,000 year reign of Christ, and that “each age of God’s plan is thus administered in a certain way, and humanity is held responsible as a steward during that time.” Later-Day Saints believe God may grant new, Scripture-level revelations at any time – that His plan can be spelled out anew in, for example, the previously unknown Book of Mormon. The fervor of the 19th century public school advocates is not only based on an understanding of Divine Will, but also the assumption that, with the right people as stewards, a perfect world can be brought into being right now. That God requires compulsory state-run schools is simply a new revelation. (1)

It would be hard to overemphasize the 19th century’s infatuation with progress and perfectibility. In such a state of mind, evils, even or especially the intractable evils that were historically classed under ‘man’s fallen nature’ were intolerable, and must be fixed at once. Many Americans were convinced that every wrong was not only within their power to right, but that the righting of all wrongs was a sacred duty. Like the woke today, and Prohibitionists of a century ago, arguing that human beings just aren’t like that merely infuriates them. The Abolitionists really were willing to burn the entire world down, if that’s what it took to end slavery. Arguments advanced by the more moderate factions, that slavery could be brought to an end over time without the horror of total war on the South and all the death and destruction that would entail, were the arguments of heretics. Those people down south were sinning, and we needed to fix it now. Mine eyes have seen the glory….

Similarly, the many were not sufficiently moral, as defined by, first of all, New England Puritans like Eaton and Barnard, and later by ministers of the other mainline and new Protestant sects. Therefore, it becomes ‘our’ duty to fix it, STAT! Never mind that the intractable ignorance, weakness of will, and inclination toward evil of us people is more a feature than a bug. Never mind that there was and remains precious little evidence that morality is something that can be imparted via compulsory graded classroom schooling. Never mind that the early 19th century was almost as heavily infested with drawing room revolutionaries challenging traditional morality as any time up to the 1950s. Nope, there is an undefined (but definitely not Catholic!) morality that needs to be beat into little heads! And we’re just the people to do it!

So now I’m several thousand words into this post, and haven’t even gotten to the book it is putatively about. More later….

1. Wed or transfer this religious fervor to Hegelianism, and – oh, boy.

Public Schooling Sucks: Some Thoughts on History

I’ve seen a couple of those viral videos of parents standing up to their local school boards and making a stink over the latest outrage – critical race theory, gender theory, the order not to watch what the school is teaching their kids, masks, vaccines, the whole load.

One wants to cheer them on, but, unfortunately, those brave, well-meaning parents just don’t get it. From Day 1, however you want to count Day 1, parents and families are the problem compulsory public schooling was invented to solve. By standing up and opposing the ‘educators’ on the school board, all these parents are doing is acting out the role those educators have already assigned them: the backward, ignorant, bigoted hicks from whom it is the school’s calling to ‘rescue’ their kids. Those educators are not trembling in fear, or trying to see how they can work with those parents. They are merely seeing confirmation of everything they already believe about those parents.

So, those educators might try to silence the parents, but, more probably, they’ll let them say whatever they want, then simply lie by omission and commission so that they can keep doing what they do. Go ahead and rant – behind the scenes, those ‘educators’ are working with their allies to simply criminalize your behaviors. Private schools? Home schooling? Those are merely trivial speed bumps, to be disposed of as the one room schools and classic liberal arts schools were disposed of, by the patient application of endless pressure until they conform or can be eliminated.

Boy, isn’t this picture all sorts of ironic and symbolic and all that!

Three moments: one, in which ‘the system’ formally collapses but the behaviors persist; one where the primacy of compliance over sanity is illustrated; and finally one where schooling stops but never ends.

1. From Clarissa’s blog: the USSR has collapsed, but decades of training persist in both the bureaocrats and the students:

In 1996 I was a college student in Ukraine. One day, we were sitting in class, the professor was speaking, the students were taking notes. Suddenly, an irate secretary from the Dean’s Office burst in. Interrupting the professor in mid-sentence she screeched,

“Everybody, get up and go out. You will be sweeping the alley outside. Now! You, too!” pointing at the professor.

The professor, a youngish guy we thought was very cool because he had traveled the world and spoke an almost fluent English blushed and started stuffing papers into his bag. Everybody got up. Except me.

“What’s going to happen if we don’t?” I asked. “This isn’t the USSR any longer. You can’t make us.”

“Get up and go sweep now!” the secretary bellowed. “Do what you are told!”

“No,” I said. “I’m a student, not a street cleaner. I’m not going to sweep. What can you do to me?”

The secretary looked apoplectic. The other students started shooshing me down.

“It’s OK, we’ll go, we are going right now!” they piped up in mousy little voices.

“You will go because you want to volunteer,” the secretary said. “It’s the right thing to do. The alley needs sweeping. You will go now.”

College students! The professor! All trying to silence Clarissa and get her to comply with the demands of a toothless tiger. Their training is complete.

2. A 16 year old girl who refused to wear a mask was handcuffed and taken out of school by police. Note: the police aren’t masked up; the students take off their masks to eat lunch. The issues is not some farcical sense of safety, but rather that a *student* dared to defy *school officials*. This young woman and her family and lawyer had decided not to put up with the bullying, and the school officials did the only thing they could do: call the cops and have a child handcuffed and hauled away. The option would have been to ignore her – and that would show weakness in front of the kids and their parents.

3. Finally, a personal story: two retired public school teachers ran an annual trip to Mexico so that high school age students could help build houses for the poor. There were usually as nearly as many adults as kids. Many of the adults made the trip year after year, even when they no longer had any kids involved. For 5 or 6 years, when our kids were the right ages, I went along.

The two teachers simply expected to lay down rules and for people to obey them – kids, parents, didn’t matter. Teacher says it, it’s rule, you do it. As you might imagine, almost everyone, kids and adults alike, went along with this without a peep. Except one year, the teachers decided that stopping in Tijuana on our way out for lunch and a little sightseeing was too dangerous, and so was not to be done. Well, one older gentleman, a guy who had run businesses and been mayor of his little town out in the sticks, who had gone on and helped organize the trip for many years, who, not surprisingly, was one of the most capable builders, he wasn’t buying it. Since my kids were catching a ride back with him, and he wanted to stop in Tijuana, he asked ME if I minded, AND asked my kids if they minded, and I of course said I don’t mind, do what you want. I can’t imagine a more competent guy for my kids to hang out with, I trust my kids, and the ‘risks’ of Tijuana were overblown, to say the least.

Well, when this got back to the teachers, I had to deal with a weeping woman asking my how I could have been complicit in such an outrage. She had told people what the rules were! The very idea that one adult simply does not have to do what another adult tells them to do was simply inconceivable to her – she was in charge! She was the teacher.

Note that nobody had any issues with any of the rules about safety while we were encamped in Mexico. We get it. We’re a bunch of kids and adults in a foreign country, so we want to behave well and be safe. But for years, a fun part of the trip was a stop in Tijuana on our way out to grab a bite and maybe buy some trinkets for folks back home. But this year, without any discussion, it was simply decided that it was now ‘unsafe’ to do what we’d done every year before. So it wasn’t a matter of the situation being any different – it was a matter of unsupported feelings that things weren’t as safe as they used to be. So, being a teacher, she just changed the rules. The very idea that other adults might want to have a say and would not instantly go along with whatever she decided brought her to tears.

Teachers are the first victims of schooling. They must be brought to heel, or filtered out.

Getting way long here. Wanted to start a discussion on the beginnings of all this, the mindsets of the people involved. Will limit it to two very early examples, and add more later as time permits. I think both these examples were in the minds of the later champions of state control of education – Fichte, Barnard, Mann, von Humboldt, Harris, certainly Dewey.

Sparta: At least the Spartans made no bones about their intentions: the family had to go so that the ‘free’ men could best defend and serve the state. Spartan children, if they passed inspection, were allowed to be raised by their mothers until age 7, at which point the state took over. Mothers and fathers did not live together, but were more or less temporary breeding couples to produce more Spartans.

Spartan boys were assigned a cohort at age 7, trained to be soldiers until age 18, typically spent a year or two spying on and terrorizing the Helots. They then became full soldiers at 20. At 60, they got to retire. Women were basically breeders, who trained the girls to grow up into the next batch of breeders.

A boy’s whole loyalty and sense of belonging was to his military band. Training was in loyalty and conformity. A boy had essentially no opportunity to develop any independent personality – and that’s the way Sparta liked it.

Despite that whole 300 mythology, the first duty of a Spartan was not war – it was to keep to Helots down. Sparta had conquered and enslaved the surrounding territories. Since you need a minimum of 8 or 9 people producing food for each Spartan soldier and mother not producing food, your slaves are going to outnumber your Spartan citizens something like 10 to 1. The fully-trained young men were sent among the Helots to make sure they knew who was in charge. This reign of terror over their slaves is what enabled the Spartans to sustain the standing army, famous for its bravery and discipline.

I find it difficult to accept how admired Sparta was by many in ancient world, and many people throughout the subsequent ages – but there it is. Sparta remained intact for centuries, but at what cost? Outside their reputation for military prowess and unbending discipline, they left nothing of much worth. Is that enough?

We live in a Sparta-haunted world. The image of Lycurgus reforming Sparta by top-down fiat seems to be a dream of our betters (if a nightmare for us little people!) By, effectively, removing the family from its natural position as the building block of society, modern would-be Lycurguses believe they, in their wisdom, could bring about a utopia of some sort – for our own good, of course.

Martin Luther’s Germany: Not passing judgement on Luther’s theology here aside from his stand on schooling and his relationship with the state in general. I discussed here Luther’s very un-Pauline habit of addressing his epistles largely to secular powers, who he never fails to attempt to recruit for his purposes, explaining what their new freedom requires of them.

Viewed from a strictly practical perspective, to make the Reformation stick, Luther had to overcome opposition from two main camps: first, from those German Catholics not buying his teachings, and second and more serious, from those who accepted his teachings too literally. The first group simply rejected the very idea of the five Solas; the second accepted them too much, so that they thought they, themselves, were as fit as Luther to interpret Scripture as they, themselves, were moved by the Spirit.

That sort of individual freedom of conscience, which later came to be associated with Luther somehow, was not at all what he meant: everyone was free to interpret Scripture the same exact way Luther did. To Luther, his was the only reading that was possible in accord with the primitive Church and under the guidance of the Spirit. If you thought Scripture meant something else, you were wrong. Contradict Luther much, and you were dead – at least, if Luther got his way.

Catholics were, for the most part, merely benighted. They could be and often were converted to believe as Luther did, and a good bit of Luther’s writing and preaching was directed toward that end. Other Protestants who accepted the principles that Scripture could be read and understood by any man under the guidance of the Spirit and acted upon those principles, yet failed to agree with Luther, were a more existential threat. From the very first, Catholics had been pointing out that, without Tradition and the authority of the Church, Scripture can be read in an almost infinite variety of contradictory ways. The existence of Sola-professing Protestants who did not agree with Luther on every point was a problem – for Luther.

From the beginning, Luther saw the hand of God in the support he received from German princes. For their part, German princes had chaffed under the meddling and arrogance of the distant, non-German Pope since at least the 10th century. Throwing off the spiritual yoke of Rome also meant getting out from under the political yoke.

Practically, any church independent of the state and making any spiritual claims at all upon the princes of that state is going to run afoul of those princes sooner rather than later, realpolitik being a thing. The solution since the beginning of history: states control religion. While they have been a spectacular failure through most of history, the Catholic Church’s attempts to stay free of state control is still one of the biggest outliers in history. The Great Schism – speaking simply historically here – lead to the creation of state-controlled Orthodox churches: Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, etc., all of which were firmly under the control of the local king or emperor, at least to the extent that the local patriarch was not likely to attempt to use his spiritual authority to dispose them- something Popes were known to try.

Luther ignored all this, and sided with the German princes, who happily supported him back.* Luther saw the support of the state as the hand of God, and so wrote to the princes and civic leaders under them to exhort them to continue to do God’s work.

Luther soon concluded that God’s work included compulsory state run schooling. He wanted every child to learn to read so that they could study Scripture; he wanted every child to learn to read in a state-controlled school so that they would reach the same conclusions from Scripture that Luther reached. The ‘risks’ of letting everyone read Scripture themselves and reach their own (Spirit-guided) conclusions were almost instantly apparent, once the Reformation got going.

Except for the few destined to be scholars, Luther and Melanchthon, who drafted up the original compulsory public school plan used by Luther, had little use for any schooling beyond the basics. Kids should learn to read, learn a little Latin, and then get on with making a living – all under the management and compulsion of the state. Clearly – and Luther talks about this – if you left such instruction to the discretion of parents, they would do it wrong!

When Fichte modernized Melanchthon’s and Luther’s plan 300 years later, he did away with anything recognizably Lutheran, and simply put the realization of the destiny of the state as the sole goal. To him, the distinction between the spiritual goals of individuals and the spiritual destiny of the (German) state was a misunderstanding, a lack of enlightenment. The value of the individual was the value that individual had to the state; the fulfillment of the state’s destiny was the personal fulfillment of the individual, insofar as personal fulfillment had any meaning.

And, of course, something this important could not be left up to parents. In fact, Fichte agrees with Luther that, left to parents, all the higher goals of education would get frustrated. Parents are the problem schooling is designed to solve. Fichte wanted to simply remove children from all family contact until their state schooling was complete. But more on that later.

* Today, the Lutheran and Catholic churches in Germany are tax-supported – the German Catholic hierarchy is the most likely to act independently from Rome on matters of morals and dogma. The German state has neutered religion – Catholic and Lutheran – in the public sphere, and has a choke collar on it financially.

Education History Book Review: F. V. N. Painter’s Luther on Education (1889) pt 2

Archive.org for the win!

The “Saxony School Plan,” originally prepared by Melancthon and revised by Luther in 1538, was extensively adopted. The current abuses of the schools in studies and discipline were pointed out. “In order that the young may be properly taught,” says the Plan, ” we have established this form :

“i. The teachers shall see to it that the children are taught only Latin, not German or Hebrew as some have hitherto done, who have burdened their pupils with too many studies, which are not only useless but hurtful. . . .

” 2. They shall not burden the children with many books, but in every way avoid a distracting multiplicity of studies.

” 3. It is necessary that the children be divided into grades.”

Ch 3: PROTESTANTISM AND POPULAR EDUCATION.

My Google-fu failed to turn up the complete Saxony School Plan. This is a common feature of reading Luther: he is quoted, he is referenced, but his actual works are not as readily available as one would think they ought to be for someone so influential. In general, I suspect that his tendency toward scatology and verbal excesses might have discouraged Lutheran translators – better he be known via his hagiography rather than his own, less flattering, words. But a Saxony School Plan should be tame enough. Maybe I’ll stumble across it.

Reading *about* the plan on online sources from academics to libertarians indicates it was very influential. In it, one (allegedly) would find all the hallmarks of moderns state compulsory education, including graded classrooms, limited subjects, truancy enforcement, control, and record-keeping (how are you going to know who belongs in what grade?) .

The ‘history’ provided by Painter leaves out a number of awkward points. Just as with the Recusant English, there were plenty of Germans not buying what Luther was selling. By establishing compulsory schools backed by the state’s monopoly on violence, he could root out the ‘heretics’. This use of the state to achieve ‘religious’ ends explains something that at first seemed odd to me: Luther addresses his letters to people with political power, not the rank and file believers. While he uses Paul’s salutations –

To the Honorable Lazarus Spengler, Counselor of the City of Nuremberg,

My dear Sir and Friend: Grace and peace in Christ, our dear Lord and faithful Saviour, Amen.

– he, in this case, sends a sermon to a civic power, not the people to whom the sermon is to be addressed. And perusing the titles of the better known letters of Luther, this seems more the rule than the exception. While Paul and the writers of the Catholic Epistles direct their letters to the faithful or friends as politically powerless as Paul himself, Luther writes to princes and other worldly powers.

He has something he wants them to hear, and it isn’t the Gospels: Luther teaches that the state is as divine in its origins and rights as the Church. It is the duty of the faithful to obey the (Lutheran) state completely. Given the German history of the preceding few centuries, this was music to German princes’s ears.

A deal is being cut: in exchange for princely support for Luther’s Reformation, the princes get religion’s support for their power. To sweeten the pot, Luther encouraged the state to sack German monasteries and convents, similarly to what was done in England, enriching the secular government and removing what could have been a hotbed of resistance to Luther’s plans.

5 centuries earlier, in 1056, Henry III, the German Holy Roman Emperor, died when his heir, the future Henry IV, was only 5 years old. The elder Henry had used his control of Italy to determine who got to be Pope, deposing Pope Gregory VI when he got too uppity, and elevating puppets. His widow, fighting to keep control of the Empire until her son reached majority, was unable to exert similar control; when Henry did take the throne, he was too busy keeping the German princes in line to focus on who got to be Pope. During the funeral proceedings for Pope Alexander II, the people started shouting for Hildebrand of Sovana, a well known reformer, to be declared Pope. He, like good men tend to do, hid out in a monastery rather than become pope. But he was found, and the Cardinals made formal what the people had wanted, and Hildebrand became Pope Gregory VII.

The biggest issue facing Gregory was the Emperor’s meddling in Church affairs to the extent of deposing and installing popes. Seeing young Henry weak, he played hardball: Henry was going to acknowledge Gregory’s election and freedom and authority, or Gregory was going to release the German nobility from any obligations to Henry – something a good number already wanted. Also, he threatened the bishops and abbots under the Empire, who had largely gotten their positions through investiture – appointment by secular powers – that they would lose their jobs if they supported Henry.

Henry was just weak enough that this worked, sort of. Henry was pressured by his bishops and friendly nobles, and made to grovel in the snow before Gregory would restore him to power. Henry did not take it lying down, installing an antipope here, waging a little war there, but, all in all, a degree of independence was temporarily restored to Rome.

It didn’t last. Instead, we got centuries where political powers fought over who got to be Pope, and then used the Pope’s authority to enrich themselves, get revenge, and otherwise extend their political power. Ugly situation. From 1309 to 1376, popes were held by the (German) Holy Roman Emperor in Avignon in what is now France – the Avignon, or Babylonian, Captivity. (Story goes that the papal ‘palace’ in Avignon stood at the foot of a hill, upon the brow of which sat a massive castle and military complex, in case the Pope ever wondered how things stood.)

At this time, Dante, writing his Divine Comedy in exile, favored, at least in the Inferno, a united Holy Roman Empire that would manage secular affairs without interference in or from the Papacy, and a papacy that would stick to spiritual affairs. (And a Holy Roman Empire that would exterminator the Black Guelfs in Florence who had exiled him. Hey, he’s Italian.) The idea of separation of Church and State, broadly understood, was nothing new when Luther seemed to support it.

Up in Germany, the common perception in all this seems to have been that loathsome Italians were bullying and haughtily snubbing the locals. It was true that Popes, on their own initiative and working with their backers, acted very poorly, to say the least. Germans, who historically seem to have chips on their shoulders in every age, embraced Luther partly because he gave them a way to get out from under Roman rules. His Rome is the Whore of Babylon schtick was popular among many – especially the nobility.

Luther’s push for state-funded and controlled compulsory schools, in which every German boy and girl would learn to read the Bible and obey the state, was appealing. This must be seen in the context of Luther’s zeal against ‘heretics’. The idea that Luther wanted everyone to read and interpret Scriptures as the Spirit moved them is laughable: he famously favored burning ‘heretics’ at the stake, with particular focus on other Protestants. People were free to discover in Scripture that they agreed with Luther, in other words. He’s no different in this respect from Calvin and his followers, who ran Geneva as a theocracy, where disputing Calvin was a capital crime.

(One thing seems odd: Luther, while calling the Pope the Whore of Babylon, was less harsh on Catholics than on Protestant ‘heretics’. I suppose a Catholic was merely someone unenlightened who might still be saved, but a Protestant who used exactly Luther’s highly individual approach to understanding Scripture yet dared to reach conclusion other than Luther’s was an existential threat. I need to read more on this topic.)

That was a huge digression even by my standards. Back to the text. After many pages of polemic laced with a little history here and there, Painter finally gets around to his translations of two of Luther’s letters regarding education. Here’s Painter’s summary of Luther’s contributions, his lead in to the letters:

We leave it to the two treatises presented in the following chapters to supply what is lacking in this survey of Luther’s pedagogy. Looking back over the ground traversed, we realize that the great Reformer accomplished scarcely less for education than for religion. Through his influence, which was fundamental, wide-reaching, and beneficent, there began for the one as for the other a new era of advancement. Let us note a few particulars:

1. In his writings, as in the principles of Protestantism, he laid the foundation of an educational system, which begins with the popular school and ends with the university.
2. He set up as the noble ideal of education a Christian man, fitted through instruction and discipline to discharge the duties of every relation of life.
3. He exhibited the necessity of schools both for the Church and the State, and emphasized the dignity and worth of the teacher’s vocation.
4. With resistless energy he impressed upon parents, ministers, and civil officers their obligation to educate the young.
5. He brought about a re-organization of schools, introducing graded instruction, an improved course of study, and rational methods.
6. In his appreciation of nature and of child-life, he laid the foundation for educational science.
7. He made great improvements in method; he sought to adapt instruction to the capacity of children, to make learning pleasant, to awaken mind through skillful questioning, to study things as well as words, and to temper discipline with love.
8. With a wise understanding of the relation of virtue and intelligence to the general good, he advocated compulsory education on the part of the State.

In view of these facts, Luther deserves henceforth to be recognized as the greatest, not only of religious, but of educational reformers.

LUTHER ON STUDIES AND METHODS.

First Letter: CHAPTER IX. LUTHER’S LETTER TO THE MAYORS AND ALDERMEN OF ALL THE CITIES OF GERMANY IN BEHALF OF CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS.

Right after greeting the mayors and aldermen of Germany, Luther identifies the villains in this story:

And because selfish parents see that they can no longer place their children upon the bounty of monasteries and cathedrals, they refuse to educate them. “Why should we educate our children,” they say, ” if they are not to become priests, monks, and nuns, and thus earn a support?”

The hollow piety and selfish aims of such persons are sufficiently evident from their own confession. For if they sought anything more than the temporal welfare of their children in monasteries and the priesthood, if they were deeply in earnest to secure the salvation and blessedness of their children, they would not lose interest in education and say, ” if the priestly office is abolished, we will not send our children to school.” But they would speak after this manner; ” if it is true, as the Gospel teaches, that such a calling is dangerous to our children, teach us another way in which they may be pleasing to God and become truly blessed; for we wish to provide not alone for the bodies of our children, but also for their souls.” Such would be the language of faithful Christian parents.

This letter is a two-pronged attack on the lack of schooling: first, the state and wealthy individuals must fund schools, so schooling is available to everyone; second, the state must use its power to compel all children to attend school.

Luther starts with a subset of the second issue: parents who could afford to educate their children but won’t send their child to school. Luther, in his usual gentle, reserved style, labels such parents faithless non-Christians and impious worshippers of mammon.

Monasteries and cathedral schools, the places where promising boys had traditionally been sent to be educated, are condemned as the work of the devil. Only newly-founded state schools fulfill the needs of enlightened parents and the state. Fortunately, Luther has freed up some cash:

There is one consideration that should move every citizen, with devout gratitude to God, to contribute a part of his means to the support of schools — the consideration that if divine grace had not released him from exactions and robbery, he would still have to give large sums of money for indulgences, masses, vigils, endowments, anniversaries, mendicant friars, brotherhoods, and other similar impositions. And let him be sure that where turmoil and strife exist, there the devil is present, who did not writhe and struggle so long as men blindly contributed to convents and masses. For Satan feels that his cause is suffering injury. Let this, then, be the first consideration to move you, — that in this work we are fighting against the devil, the most artful and dangerous enemy of men.

Luther them cites Scripture, equating ‘you must instruct your children’ with ‘you must send your children to school to be instructed by somebody else’ – unless you want to be damned, of course. The state must step up and educate children because

…the great majority of parents are unqualified for it [educating their own children], and do not understand how children should be brought up and taught. For they have learned nothing but to provide for their bodily wants; and in order to teach and train children thoroughly, a separate class is needed.

From the very beginning: parents are the problem compulsory state schooling is intended to solve. Parents don’t understand how children should be brought up, but Luther, who fathered his first child at the age of 42, does.

…even if parents were qualified and willing to do it themselves, yet on account of other employments and household duties they have no time for it, so that necessity requires us to have teachers for public schools, unless each parent employ a private instructor. But that would be too expensive for persons of ordinary means, and many a bright boy, on account of poverty, would be neglected.

Second Letter:

CHAPTER X.

SERMON ON THE DUTY OF SENDING CHILDREN TO SCHOOL.
DEDICATORY LETTER.

To the Honorable Lazarus Spengler, Counselor of the City of Nuremberg

This letter consists of 3 parts: an introduction to Herr Spengler, and a sermon divided into two parts. The first half exhorts parents to send their kids to school to save their (parent’s and children’s) souls, and a second part exhorting parents to send their children to school for the benefit of the state, and explaining how the state has the right to compel school attendance. Bottom line: if you don’t send your kids to school, you’re going to hell.

Luther sends his sermon to Spengler and asks him to distribute it among the pastors and preachers in his jurisdiction. Key points:

The state is divinely ordained to a purpose less than the divine purposes of ministerial offices, but none the less essential:

But it [secular government] is still a beautiful and divine ordinance, an excellent gift of God, who ordained it, and who wishes to have it maintained as indispensable to human welfare ; without it men could not live together in society, but would devour one another like the irrational animals. Therefore, as it is the function and honor of the ministerial office to make saints out of sinners, to restore the dead to life, to confer blessedness upon the lost, to change the servants of the devil into children of God : so it is the function and honor of civil government to make men out of wild animals, and to restrain them from degenerating into brutes. It protects every one in body, so that he may not be injured; it protects every one in family, so that the members may not be wronged; it protects every one in house, lands, cattle, property, so that they may not be attacked, injured, or stolen.

The state has the right and duty to compel parents and guardians to send all kids to school:

But I maintain that the civil authorities are under obligation to compel the people to send their children to school, especially such as are promising, as has elsewhere been said. For our rulers are certainly bound to maintain the spiritual and secular offices and callings, so that there may always be preachers, jurists, pastors, scribes, physicians, school-masters, and the like; for these can not be dispensed with. If the government can compel such citizens as are fit for military service to bear spear and rifle, to mount ramparts, and perform other martial duties in time of war; how much more has it a right to compel the people to send their children to school because in this case we are warring with the devil, whose object it is secretly to exhaust our cities and principalities of their strong men, to destroy the kernel and leave a shell of ignorant and helpless people, whom he can sport and juggle with at pleasure. That is starving out a city or country, destroying it without a struggle, and without its knowledge. The Turk does differently, and takes every third child in his empire to educate for whatever he pleases. How much more should our rulers require children to be sent to school, who, however, are not taken from their parents, but are educated for their own and the general good, in an office where they
have an adequate support.

Fichte, when he updated Luther’s schooling ideas in 1809, damns Luther with faint praise and dismisses his theology. He also dismisses the idea that compulsory public schools are not to simply confiscate children Luther says kids who are not destined to become scholars might spend as little as an hour or two a day in school; Fichte want kids to be completely separated from family for the duration of their schooling. This is a quibble over details, once you accept the principle that the state, not the parents, has the ultimate right to educate kids. Under that rule, the state can demand as much or as little separation from the family as it sees fit, teach them whatever the state wants, and all other details of their schooling. Parents simply have no standing to complain.

The state needs your child:

You must indeed be an insensible and ungrateful creature, fit to be ranked among the brutes, if you see that your son may become a man to help the emperor maintain his dominions, sword, and crown — to help the prince govern his land, to counsel cities and states, to help protect for every man his body, wife, child, property, and honor — and yet will not do so much as to send him to school and prepare him for this work!

There is a lot more to these letters. The key points are as Painter summed them up: the state must provide schooling for ‘free’ to everyone, and compel attendance. Further, opposing compulsory schooling is treason and damns one to hell. Education is not the sort of things parents understand, and so cannot be left up to them. Graded classrooms are essential, as is the record keeping needed to make sure each child is in the right grade.

Education History Book Review: F. V. N. Painter’s Luther on Education (1889) pt 1

Internet Archive, bless them!

Painter, a vehement proponent of Protestantism and Whore of Babylon style anti-Catholic, has translated 2 of Luther’s letters on education, to make better known the great Reformer’s seminal contributions to compulsory state-funded graded classroom schooling. All that stuff which we associate with modern schooling is proposed and defended by Luther, starting in 1520.

This work is really 2 short books, the first of which is Painter’s take on the Reformation, the second his translations of two of Luther’s letters. Therefore, I’ll do this in two parts. The first is Painter’s “historical introduction”:

The fact that no great character can be fully understood without an acquaintance with the age in which he lived and the movements with which he was identified, led to the preparation of the first four chapters as a historical introduction.

Preface

These first four chapters make up about 60% of the work, and are not exactly what anyone not as on fire with Protestant zeal as Painter would call ‘balanced’. No one, Catholic or Protestant, would dispute the general claim of profound hellish corruption of the Church’s hierarchy in the 16th century. But no one who understands the effects of investiture can honestly point to the Church herself as the primary cause. When every bishop and abbot is a partisan, and often a relative, of the local prince or king, appointed at their pleasure based on loyalty or politics, and the Pope appointed by Emperors with no regard to the candidate’s spiritual suitability, then perhaps the secular government might seem a more likely locus to place blame. The issue is not simply that the Church was deeply involved in politics, but that the leaders of the Church had gotten their positions because of politics.

Yet, to Painter, Gregory VII’s attempt to pry control of the Church out of secular hands is seen as yet another foul Popish plot. That Gregory frustrated the attempts of the German Emperor Henry IV to appoint a pope to his liking is not the occasion for any introspection on the role of German emperors in corrupting the Church, but seen as overwhelming evidence of Papal perfidy.

Painter’s opening chapters contain a little history, true, but like the writings of Luther himself, quickly segue to polemic no matter what the topic putatively under discussion. The Catholic Church is irredeemably evil, the chosen tool of Satan, and an enemy of Protestant America. The enemy of my enemy is my friend: Painter goes so far as to defend the Albigensians, whose insane and destructive Gnosticism is pretty far from even Painter’s idea of Christianity, because the Church crushed them. He didn’t get around to defending the Aztecs, but one imagines he would, given his premises and zeal.

All good things that have happened in the West, and, indeed, the world, since 1517 are the result of Protestantism. America is a Protestant enterprise (no argument there from me) in which is no place for Catholics. American Catholics are (to the surprise of actual Catholics) awaiting orders from the Pope to whom all spiritual and temporal allegiance is sworn. Protestant Americans want to educate everyone; the Church wants to keep people stupid. One quotation will have to suffice:

Yet the Papacy is not favorable to the education of the masses. It seeks above all things absolute obedience on the part of its adherents. Intelligence among the laity is recognized as a dangerous possession; for it ministers to their independence in thinking, and makes them more critical of the teaching imposed upon them by priestly authority. Any activity displayed by the Papacy in popular education is forced by the existence of Protestant schools. The establishment of parish schools giving an education worth the name, is a measure of self-defense. The Jesuits, with all their lauded activity in education, never had the intellectual elevation of the masses at heart. With them education was a means of combating Protestantism, and of begetting a bigoted attachment to the Roman Church. Wherever the Papacy has had full control of education, the masses have been brought up in ignorance. It is a Jesuit maxim that ” A few should be well educated ; the people should be led. Reading and writing are enough for them.” When Victor Emmanuel took possession of the Papal States in 1870, only five per cent, of the population could read and write. In thrift and intelligence Catholic countries do not compare favorably with Protestant countries. Macaulay’s judgment on this point is as just as it is positive. ” During the last three centuries, to stunt the growth of the human mind has been the chief object of the Church of Rome. Throughout Christendom, whatever advance has been made in knowledge, in freedom, in wealth, and in the arts of life, has been made in spite of her, and has everywhere been in inverse proportion to her power. The loveliest and most fertile provinces of Europe have, under her rule, been sunk in poverty, in political servitude, and in intellectual torpor, while Protestant countries, once proverbial for sterility and barbarism, have been turned by skill and industry into gardens, and can boast of a long list of heroes and statesmen, philosophers and poets.”

Yet, somehow, scholars are not lacking among the canonized saints of the Church, which Church invented the university, and so on. Gregor Mendel and Georges Lemaître, among many thousands of other Catholic scientists and inventors, might find Painter’s analysis amusing.

Painter believes compulsory state education is an unmitigagted good, and that Catholic opposition to it is proof of the nefarious goals of the Papacy:

From the preceding discussion we may easily deduce the line of action that is necessary to protect our institutions, particularly our public school system, against papal aggression.

1. We should carefully observe the insidious movements of the Papacy.

2. Recognizing the separation of Church and State wisely made by the Constitution, we should nowhere tolerate sectarian legislation.

3. Maintaining the right of the State to educate its citizens, we should forbid the appropriation of any public funds to sectarian schools.

4. All public school offices should be filled with recognized friends of popular education.

5. The rights of conscience should be maintained and defended by the State.

In order to present the appearance of a united Protestant front against Catholics, Painter is here resorting to something like what Lewis called ‘mere Christianity,’ this fantasy under which some undefined subset of Protestants are really all basically primitive evangelical Christians despite disputes over dogma that had fractured them into dozens of flavors even by Painter’s time. Are Mormons Christians? How about Jehovah’s Witnesses or Seventh Day Adventists? Unitarians? Why not? When reading the contemporary writings of the early 19th century, it’s not unusual to come across a Presbyterian, say, who is sure his Methodist neighbor is going straight to Hell. The earlier Protestants were hardly afraid of dogma, and believed it a life or death matter. Painter certainly does, although what exactly those dogmas are and who, exactly, he considers his co-religionists, is unclear. What is clear from history: the one thing that united 19th century Protestants was hatred of the Catholic Church.

Painter’s freedom of conscience is, when fully played out, what we have today: it is unpardonable bigotry to say anyone isn’t whatever they say they are, or to condemn anything they want to do. Painter himself is a huge fan of the vigorously judgmental Luther – just read anything Luther wrote about anything for examples. The judgement of Catholics that the Church holds the full truth of Christianity is a claim any proper Lutheran or Calvinist or Methodist would have once sternly made for their own beliefs as well. And – this is critical – if you believe that your church holds the fullness of the Faith, it would be incumbent upon you to convert as many people as possible to this Truth, AND to do whatever you could to have this truth embodied in society, in culture, and in law – for everybody’s objective good. When we say that America is a Protestant nation, is this not what we mean? That the laws, culture, and society are the expression of the Protestant beliefs of the Founding Fathers and the culture that produced them? And that, finally, the dissolution of America that we are experiencing right now is also an expression of that culture, which never was as homogenous as myth would have it? The New England Calvinists despised the Virginia Episcopalians, and visa versa, for one example among many. These inherited animosities and the manifest drive toward fragmentation are as much a part of the Protestant roots of America as the reverence for individual conscience and faith in the perfectibility of man.

Wow, I fell into exactly what Painter did: using a format – him, an introduction; me, a book review – to expound our personal beliefs. Oops. To yank this back on topic: for my purposes, Painter’s introductory chapters merely reiterate that the beliefs that drove the Know-Nothings back in the first half of the 19th century were still going strong in the second half. Separating out, as much as we can, the mere anti-Catholic bigotry, we can ask: Did the Know Nothings have a legitimate grievance? Largely, yes – Catholic immigrants were being used by Tammany Hall and other thuggish governments as a way to get and hold power. Fresh off the boat, Catholic immigrants got housing, food, a job funded by graft and corruption, and a meeting with a judge on the take who granted them citizenship in defiance of the law. These newly-minted Americans were then told how to vote, and woe to any who dared question it! Thus, Democratic party machines got and held power in major American cities, power they continue to hold, for the most part. It was an immigration problem foreshadowing the one we have now. The Know Nothings had a legitimate case for wanting tighter immigration and naturalization laws.

But, alas! Those corrupt political machines were never really cleaned up. Rather, their practices became normalized and invisible. Thus, instead of having a Fred Roti run Chicago, you merely have an understanding that no one who actively opposes the machine is every getting anywhere. So, you shut up and go along, or move out. The Roti family may not be around to off troublemakers like in the good old days, but that’s only because challenges to the system are simply cut off much more elegantly now.

And many Catholic are complicit in this. One can hardly blame them for accepting with gratitude the help of Tammany Hall or the job as a policeman in Chicago, back in the day, but at some point, the lightbulb will go on – unless one actively works to keep it off.

So, at the same time, the last few decades of the 19th century, we have Painter saying that the efforts of Catholics to keep their kids out of pubic schools amounts to treason; Catholic bishops saying that it is the duty of every parish to build a Catholic school, so that every Catholic child in America can be educated outside the virulently anti-Catholic public schools; and Archbishop Ireland telling the NEA that, eventually, all Catholic children will attend public schools.

It’s messy and confusing. Painter ends up ‘winning’ this battle, in that Catholic schools now produce graduates who have no allegiance to anything the Church teaches, in the unlikely event they even learn what those teachings are. But his victory is Pyrrhic: the pure and noble Protestantism he loved is, if anything, even deader.

Education History Book Review: Shield’s Making and Unmaking of a Dullard

Thomas Shields (1862-1921), a priest and doctor of psychology at Catholic University of America, wrote his Making and Unmaking of a Dullard in 1909. Although written in the form of a dialogue taking place at weekly dinner parties over the course of months, it is universally considered his autobiography. As a dialogue, it is a resounding failure: no one besides the author comes off any deeper than a cardboard cutout, nor contributes much of anything except leading questions that simply interrupt the flow of Shields’s story.

Archive.org is wonderful

This book reinforces an impression long held: the central figures in American education history are, almost without exception, unimaginative mediocrities. Horace Mann or William Torey Harris would, I imagine, bore one to tears ov er a beer, if they every did something so common; Shields comes off as precisely the sort of academic Silence Dogood or Mark Twain would have a field day with. The one exception, whose native brilliance sometimes shines through his prose, is, alas, a force for evil. John Dewey is a sharp dude, and a horror. Other intelligent men, like Brownson and Hecker, merely wrote about education without being crowned as ‘educationists’. And they have their own issues.

Back to Shields. Here is the list of participants in the dialogue, with as much as I can glean about their personalities and roles:

• Mr. O’Brien – the host?
• Mrs. O’Brien – The O’Briens make obvious statements or ask obvious questions
• Miss Russell/Miss Ruth – model teacher in the Lee School; “eminently qualified to enlighten us on the characteristic features of the modem school- room.” She provides the latest news on education trends.
• Judge Russell – her father? A judge, who also had a horrible experience in school but overcame it to become a judge. A gruff, elderly voice. O’Brien announces at the beginning that Judge Russell will need to keep the peace between the next two characters.
• Dr. Studevan – Shields
• Professor Shannon – Shields’s adversary, I guess. He provides the current wisdom, and reads articles from magazines. Maybe the Simplicio of the scene?

Bottom line: except for the O’Briens, each of these characters delivers a brief monologue or two early in the festivities, makes a few remarks, then, essentially, disappears half-way through. I never once wondered what the Judge or Shannon was going to say about anything – they, and all the characters, are, effectively, furniture.

One fascinating thing: complaints made about the schools in 1909 sound oddly modern. For example, Shannon quotes at length from G. Stanley Hall: *

“Many of the boys, especially in the upper classes of the high schools, are so out-numbered that they are practically in a girls’ school, taught by women at just that age when vigorous male control and example are more needed than at any other time of life. The natural exuberance of the boy is often toned down, but if he is to be well virified later, ought he not in the middle teens, and later, to be so boisterous at times as to be rather unfit for constant companionship with girls ? Is there not something wrong with the high school boy who can truly be called a perfect gentleman, or whose conduct and character conform to the ideals of the average unmarried female teacher? Boys need a different discipline, moral regimen, atmosphere, and method of work. Under female influence certainly — as, alas, too often under that of the male teacher — form now always tends to take precedence over content. The boy revolts at much method with meager matter, craves utility and application. Too often, when the very germs of his manhood are burgeoning, all these instincts are denied, and he is compelled to learn the stated lessons which every one else in the country is learning at his age, to work all day with girls.”

“the February number of Munsey’s“

I think this is meant to be a dig at Shields, as he was (I think – have to look through the notes) a major proponent of women teachers, which would mesh with the weird otherwise content-free adversarial relationship between Shannon and Shields. Also, it’s worth remembering that American ‘educationists’ had only recently managed to sell the idea of high school for everyone. 15 or 20 years earlier, few would be talking about high school age boys not getting enough exposure to manly-men in school, because teen age boys weren’t in school for the most part.

Back to Shields. His laboriously-told story is that, at the age of 9, his teacher judged him unfit for any academic pursuits, labeled him ‘Studevan’s omadhaun’ (an Irish term meaning fool) and sent him home to work on the farm. Shields’s says that he had learned how to read and perform the multiplication tables, but had merely been advanced too far – he couldn’t quite manage the 3rd Reader, had been humiliated and terrified into a silence he could not overcome. Thus, from age 9 to 16, interrupted briefly at age 13 by another failed attempt at school, he stayed home and worked on the farm. He forgot almost all the math and reading he had learned, and accepted the judgement of his teacher and family: he was simply a dullard, incapable of any intellectual achievement.

As he entered his 16th year, a slowly-developing sense that he wasn’t so dumb after all accelerated. Farm work left a lot of time for thought, and he tried to figure out the various measures used on the farm, and the working of the farm equipment. Finally, he became obsessed with building a stump-puller based on his understanding of how levers and pulleys worked, secretly modified an abandoned machine to that end, snuck it out to the fields when his family was at Mass – and yanked up some stumps.

Now convinced that he could at least become a mechanic, he began to pursue knowledge, recovering his ability to read, and, I suppose, the rest is history. At least, this is where the story ends.

Early in the story, the interlocutors discuss how the dullard – by which they seem to mean any child uninterested or incapable of doing as they are told – is the bane of all teachers. Miss Russell and Professor Shannon read or recite statistics and stories illustrating the appalling frequency of dullards – half of NYC kids, for example, were, in modern terms, not performing to grade level. Shannon generously points out that a huge percentage of those kids are immigrant children trying to learn English at the same time they are trying to keep up in school, but allows that, even so, there a lot of idiots out there.

Finally, the create something of a taxonomy of dullards. They identify 7 ways a kid can become an idiot:

• heredity,
• disease,
• environment,
• malnutrition,
• defective senses,
• fright,
• alternating phases of physical and mental development

I don’t know anyone who would argue that the first 6 causes are not real, and, in the story, no one disputes them. Note here that Shields creates a single class – dullards – into which he puts all kids who are not cooperative or responsive in school. The nearsighted and hard of hearing are classed with the bored and violent, and the truly mentally deficient, and so on. But Shields is not interested in the first 6 causes because they do not apply to him, and so they are not developed at all. Instead, we focus on his pet theory: that kids alternate phases of physical and mental development, and that trying to get a kid to learn when he’s in a phase of physical development is futile and injurious. Pardon the long quotation, part of which I’ve already quoted in my earlier preliminary review – here is Shields explanation of his theory:

“A full explanation of this physiological phenomenon, Judge, would involve a treatise on the physiology of the nervous system, but stripped of technicalities the important facts in the case are these. All vital functions are controlled by nerve currents. The quality and quantity of every secretion, as well as body temperature, respiration, and the circulation of the blood, depend upon appropriate nerve currents. And not only this, but the nutrition and growth of every organ and gland, of every cell in the body, are dependent upon the same source. A broken bone, for instance, if it be deprived of its proper nerve supply, will never heal.

“On the other hand, the process of mental development, as indeed all the phenomena of consciousness, rest upon high tension nerve currents in the cerebral cortex. Now, it frequently happens that a boy or girl grows very rapidly for a few years, during which period the physical organism makes such demands upon the nerve energy that the cortical tension is lowered and there is not sufficient nerve energy left to carry on the work of rapid mental development.

“We all know how injurious it is, for example, to indulge in mental work immediately after eating a hearty meal. When food enters the stomach it originates nerve impulses that draw the blood away from the brain for use in the processes of digestion. If brain activity be indulged in at this time, the blood is withdrawn from the viscera and forced into the brain under an increased pressure to furnish the required nerve energy and thus the digestive process is delayed and sometimes the digestive apparatus itself is injured.

“Now, we have a similar conflict going on between mental and physical development. It seldom happens that during childhood and youth the balance is preserved between the growth and development of the body and the growth and development of the mental processes. The extent to which this balance is disturbed and the length of time that each phase continues varies within wide limits.”

“If you exclude the children who have become dullards through any one of the six causes just enumerated, and arrange the children in any third or fourth grade room in accordance with their physical development, you will find them fairly well classified inversely as their mental capacity, that is, the brightest children will be the smallest and the largest children will be the dullest. Here and there puzzling exceptions to this rule will be found, but these are not sufficient to obscure the general truth.

“The eagerness and ambition of the smaller children, coupled with their quickness of movement, indicate high cortical tension. If these children are constantly over stimulated, as frequently happens, their physical development may be retarded for some years. In extreme cases they are to be found among those children whom over-fond mothers are in the habit of regarding as too bright or too good for this world. Less aggravated cases not infrequently result in permanent invalidism. This is particularly true of girls when the period of over stimulation is carried beyond the twelfth or the fourteenth year. If these precocious little ones escape disease and death from over stimulation they will finally reach a time in which the balance swings in the opposite direction and physical development, so long retarded, sets in with unusual rapidity. The ensuing mental phase is characterized by lack of energy which to the uninstructed is pure laziness.

“If the pupils are at this time entrusted to incompetent teachers the discouragement into which they fall is likely to degenerate into permanent dullness from which they make no further effort to escape. And thus it happens that precocious children are seldom heard from in after life. I am quite convinced, however, that when the precociousness is not due to inherited or acquired disease this result may be prevented by competent teachers. But in the present condition of our schools the chances of permanent success are much better where the physical development of the child is in the ascendant during the early years of school life. Here the danger to health from over stimulation is avoided and when at last the processes of physical development begin to slow up, if the discouragement is not too deep, mental life may awaken to a new vigor.

“Either extreme, however, is difficult to manage and may prove dangerous in the hands of incompetent or careless teachers. A balance between the two processes of development is the safest and may be considered the condition of typical children. The development of these children should accordingly determine the work of the grade and their condition should form the ideal towards which the teacher should constantly strive to lead the developmental processes in the atypical children.”

CHAPTER V – Alternating Phases of Physical and Mental Development

Recall that Shields is a professor of psychology at Catholic University of America, under Fr. Edward Pace, founder of the Psychology department at that school, and a student of Wilhelm Wundt. To quote Wikipedia:

A survey published in American Psychologist in 1991 ranked Wundt’s reputation as first for “all-time eminence” based on ratings provided by 29 American historians of psychology. William James and Sigmund Freud were ranked a distant second and third.^[6]

So the ‘scientific’ stylings of Shields are by no means some outlier – he’s but one step removed from the greatest psychologist of his age. It would be straightforward, if a bit time-consuming and tedious, to, you know, *test* those theories of his, after the manner of actual scientists, plenty of whom were contemporaneously extant. But psychologists prefer insight, after the manner of Hegel and Marx – you just *know* what’s what, because you’ve thought about it at and you’re just so smart and enlightened. Rather than examining those perplexing outliers – guys like me, who have always been among the largest and quickest children in any classroom I’ve ever been in – indeed, rather than setting up any sort of systematic approach to examining his assumptions, Shields just runs with it. He concludes – and keep in mind, he is among the most influential ‘educationists’ in American history – teachers need to retard the progress of – dumb down – the smart kids in order to save them from the all but inevitable sickness, death, or at least invalidism, that will inevitably result from letting them study what they want.

The key aspects here:

• Highly trained teachers are essential
• Constant monitoring of students is essential
• Any error in technique can have devastating consequences
• Graded classrooms are essential
• The average student’s learning capacity (within a graded classroom) is the standard to which all students will be held.
• Exceeding that standard is as bad or worse than falling beneath it
• All of the above are Science!(tm)

How about, just for kicks, another set of conclusions from the same data Shields presents?

• Schooling from age 9 to 16 is unnecessary – Shields got none, and he became an elite professor at an elite university
• Better to grow up on a farm and do useful work than go to school.
• If you skip 7 years of schooling, you can catch up in a matter of months.

Shields does have Shannon Simplicio point much of this out, only so that he can mock him and (very unconvincingly) shoot it down.

It is from men like Shields and thinking like this that modern schooling has been built.

Next up: F. V. N. Painter’s Luther on education; including a historical introduction, and a translation of the reformer’s two most important educational treatises (1889). About half-way through. All I can say: if you want to understand why Catholics wanted nothing to do with public schools, Mr. Painter will explain it to you.

* Hall is another 19th – early 20th century psychologist, the usual mixture of eugenics fanatic and ‘educationist’. Then as now, psychology, perhaps even more than other academic fields, attracts nuts and mediocrities who, enabled by education and certification, are then hellbent on telling saner, happier people how to live.