Education And The New America

SOL0NT. IIMBALD --b -

JAMES B. MGGLELLAN

E.A.I N.A.
R.H.

EDUCATION
and the

NEW AMERICA

Solon T. Kimball
and

James E. McClellan

Here is the first major systematic re-examina-
tion of the state of education in American
society to appear in several decades. With a
philosophy of education appropriate to oni
times, the authors of this penetrating survey
a philosopher and an anthropologist examine
not only the new responsibilities of American
education in a society undergoing transforma-
tion, but ultimately the question of the indi-
vidual's persona] commitment to that society.

By their treatment of the crucial function oi
education in a system characterized by great
corporate superstructures and isolated, mobile
families, the authors seek to discover if the
promise of America can, under such conditions,
still be realized. Thus, this work is not merely
a discussion of current educational problems,
it is, in effect, a basic reappraisal of America's
emergent form of civilization.

All educators, students, and responsible laymen
concerned with the future of America as it is
being shaped today in our educational setting
will find this a book of the first magnitude-
cogent, readable, but, most of all, filled with
fresh insights and challenging, constructive
comments on some of the key issues of our age.

3 1148 00199 4896

MAI JAN ]37 g
JAN 13 1976

.VIA; JUN 11 1 ^
MAI JAN 1 3 1958

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KimbaH

Education and the

65-09177
new America

EDUCATION
AND THE

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EDUCATION

AND THE

NEW AMERICA

BY

Solon T. Kimball

AND

James E. McClellan, Jr.

RANDOM HOUSE NEW YORK

FIRST PRINTING

Copyright, 1962, by Random House, Inc.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in New York by Random House, Inc., and simul-
taneously in Toronto, Canada, by Random House of Canada, Limited.

^Library of Congress Catalog Card Number:, 62-16207

Manufactured in the United States of America by
The Haddon Craftsmen, Inc., Scranton, Pa.

Design by Ruth Smerechniak

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy
present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we
must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must
think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and
then we shall save our country.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

From the Annual Message to Congress, December i, 1862

6309177

to , / ->

Preface

The present volume is the offspring of an academically un-
sanctioned union of anthropology and philosophy of education,
In popular mythology, natural children are supposed to be
marked by excessive vigor and ruthlessness in the pursuit of their
goals. If these qualities are present in this book, we should count
them assets. For the task of this book is a large one, and its ac-
complishment will require the sacrifice of the usual niceties of
academic discourse.

The task? It is no less than that of bringing into contemporary
focus the traditional message of the professional educationist,
namely that the schools must change to meet the demands of a
changing society. When Dewey, in 1899, delivered the three lec-
tures which were issued as The School and Society, this message
was already a standard one, and Dewey's contribution was to give
it particular relevance to tibe impact of industrialism in America.
Dewey recognized that the dynamic source of social change lay
outside the school. He insisted, however, that the school's role
was not merely a passive one of adjusting to changes already
occurring but was also an active one of preserving the most
precious values of an older culture that would otherwise be de-
stroyed in the transition to a new society. (We explain this aspect
of Dewey's thought more fully in Chapter 5.) Dewey's ex-
pression added a distinctive text to the educationist's message, a
text to be reiterated by this book, but in a new form.

viii . Preface

In the 1930'$ a new theme was added to the message. "This is a
crisis! We must act now! Tomorrow may see the whole social
fabric ripped apart and all values destroyed in the great maelstrom
of class conflict!" The deep sense of urgency then became an over-
tone in all the discourse of educationists, among themselves and
between them and the public. The reader will have no difficulty
seeing this same sense of urgency in the present book.

But the specific social analysis made by Dewey is no more ap-
plicable to the present situation than is Hobbes' Leviathan.
Even so, both Dewey and Hobbes would seem to have an endur-
ing applicability that is sadly lacking in the crisis mentality we
inherited from the thirties. However just what are the changes
in the larger society to which the school must adjust? Just why
is there an immediacy in the demands all about us? A changed
role for the school? To be sure, but precisely changed from what
to what? The literature available gave no answers, or at least
gave no answers that seemed to us compatible with the actual
world we saw every day about us.

And so we had to start afresh, hoping to bring forth new cate-
gories and schemes of thought adequate to the contemporary
scene. We had to begin where Dewey began his own life, in
agrarian America. We had to try to see just what sort of social
system that time and place produced and what sort of school
developed in it. Then, like Dewey still, we had to see the impact
of the new industrial age, with all its power for producing good
and evil for mankind. Then like the Social Frontiersmen of the
thirties, we had to see the disastrous consequences of the new
concentrations of power and the alienation of the proletariat
from the forces of production in a capitalist economy. But unlike
our predecessors, we know that neither social change nor social
thought ended with Karl Marx and his world of exploitative
capitalism. On the contrary, wholly new forms of human associa-
tion have made their appearance since his time, forms that es-
sentially make all previous social class analyses anachronisms.
We had to discover the categories to account for these new forms,

Preface : ix

or where we couldn't discover them, try to forge them for our-
selves.

For the message of the educationists has gone stale even in
their own mouths, and nobody outside the "profession" bothers
to listen at all. We can go on repeating what Dewey and others
have said, but we cannot take their words with personal serious-
ness. The point is, however, that never was the educationists'
message so clear and urgent as it is today. The educationists,
charged by the public and their professional obligations with pre-
paring a new generation to meet the problems of a new age, often
feel themselves in the position of a lookout screaming, "Iceberg
ahead!" to a strangely uncomprehending captain and crew. In
this same illustration, the public and their leaders may be likened
to a captain and crew who find it terribly strange that the lookout
should be concerned about icebergs while the ship is sailing along
the equator. What the lookout sees is a submerged reef, all the
more dangerous because misnamed. If the educationists and the
public they are supposed to serve cannot find a basically common
social diagnosis, one that corresponds to the reality of the public's
world, catastrophe is not unlikely.

Thus this book is addressed both to educationists and to the
so-called lay public. In this day when so many of the fundamental
decisions that affect our collective existence as a people have
been taken as the exclusive prerogative of experts, it is indeed
heartening that every man can and does feel himself an expert
on education. The peculiar historical accident by which schooling
was "reserved to the people" in the Constitution may be symbolic
of the more profound fact that citizens are capable of both under-
standing the issues and problems of educational policy, and act-
ing intelligently in cooperation with their neighbors to solve those
problems. But to be intelligent, the citizen must fully comprehend
what the professional is trying to tell him, and in turn, the pro-
fessional must state his message in language that makes sense to
the public at large. We have tried to provide the language and
ideas that will make that discourse possible.

The book, then, is not modest in intent nor, perhaps unfortu-

x : Preface

nately, in tone. In the text itself we have paid scant attention to
the many profound scholars whose ideas are basic to much of
our thinking. This may explain the very elaborate notes and
references at the end of the book. In that section we not only
refer the reader to other authors, we also take those authors
seriously enough to criticize their ideas. In establishing the
needed communication between a profession and its public, this
book is, we hope, a good beginning, but it is not by any means
the end.

Besides the authors from -whom we have drawn, we must also
pay tribute to another group otherwise not mentioned in these
pages, namely those students who have listened to our ideas, have
thought them through, torn them apart, and given them back to
us much improved. Those men and women have left Teachers
College to assume positions of authority and responsibility in
every phase of educational work in all parts of the globe. To them
our thanks and hope that we have helped them at least somewhat
as much as they have helped us.

Acknowledgments should also be made to those who helped in
typing the manuscript and in similar ways deserve all the thanks
we can offer. In particular, we appreciate the faithful assistance
of Miss Louise Stearns, without whose help our task would have
been immeasurably more difficult. In addition, we also wish to
thank Mrs. Helen Zolot, Mrs. Ruth Greenberg, and Miss Jinnie
Hahn, all of whom at one time or another have worked with us.
The completion of the manuscript was greatly facilitated by the
freedom from academic duties made possible by our sabbatical
year at Teachers College and, in addition, by the Faculty Fel-
lowship of the Social Science Research Council held by Mr. Kim-
ball. A final expression of gratitude has been reserved for our col-
leagues, both educationists and others, whose discussions helped
us to clarify our thinking and who gave us, often unknowingly,
much needed encouragement.

CONTENTS

PART ONE

THE REALITY AND THE PROMISE

1 Introduction: Education and the Problem of Commit-
ment in Contemporary American Life 3

The Order and Energy of American Life 5

Commitment and the Joy of Living g

Learning Assent to America: A Personal Note 16

2 Education and the Transformation of America 19

Sampling the Critical Literature on Education 21

The Great Conversation 29

Private and Public Worlds 34

The Educative Process 36

The Transitional Function of Education 39

3 America: The Promised Land 42

Progress: Technological and Social Corollaries 43

The Scientific versus the Agrarian 47

Cultural Distinctions 54

Problems and Purpose 61

4 The Immediate Past: Midwest Agrarianism and Main
Street Towns 64

Commercial Agrarianism of the Midwest 66

Farm and Family 71

Town and Country 80

Social Class and the Town-Community 82

oi : Contents

5 Progressive Education: The Transition from Agrarian

to Industrial America 87

The Meaning of Schooling in Agrarian America 90

The Progressives in Education 96
Progressivism and the Moral Commitment of

Teachers 107

6 Metropolis in Time and Space 115

The Demography of Metropolis 117

Los Angeles: An Alternative Metropolitan Type 123

The Face of the City 1 24

Social Differentiation and Metropolitan Culture 129

7 Valuing in Contemporary America: A Family Centered
Perspective 135

Family Life: Isolation Belonging versus Pri-
vacy 139
Church Activity: An Emotional Adjunct 147
The Esthetic Values: Mass Art and Private Sym-
bols 150
The Political Values of the American People as
Symbolic Systems Richly, Widely, Deeply Ex-
tended 155

8 Science and Self-Fulfillment 163

American Civilization and Self -Consciousness 164
The Basic Ideas of American Society 167
American Society and the Nature of the Uni-
verse 167
American Society and the Drama of History 172
Individual Expression and Commitment 177

Contents : xiii

9 The Corporate Society and Education 183

The Organizational Revolution 186
Voluntary Associations within a Corporate So-
ciety 195
Corporate Organization 200
The Corporation's Impact on Community 202
Internal Organization and Operation 205
School Organization and the Educative Process 211

PAKT TWO

EDUCATION AND COMMITMENT

10 The Nature of Commitment: A Comparative Approach 2 1 9

Irish Familism 220

Navaho Reality and Symbolism 227
Conflict and Commitment: Claimant, Sponsor,

Symbol 232

The American Scene 235

11 The Symbols of Commitment and Institutional Life 239

Commitment in the Concrete Affairs of Life

Mobility 243

The "Old Army" 246

The Teaching Profession 247

Civic Participation 249

Age and Sex The Family 252

12 The Elements of Commitment and Sense of Self 259

The Symbols of Commitment Reconsidered 259

A Sense of Self and a Sense of the World 262

Moral Commitment and Structural Connections 268

Summary 277

xiv ; Contents

13 Education for Commitment 279

Commitment and Experience 282
Commitment Through Education 284
Preschool Childhood 285
First Years of School 288
Adolescence and Beyond 293
Integration of Formal Education with Occupa-
tional Pursuits 293
Disciplines of Thought and Action 297

14 Moral Commitment and the Individual 305

The New Meaning to "Moral" 306

Notes and References 325

Bibliography 379

Index 395

PART ONE

THE REALITY

AND

THE PROMISE

1

INTRODUCTION:
EDUCATION

AND THE

PROBLEM OF COMMITMENT

IN CONTEMPORARY

AMERICAN LIFE

A vague and persistent uneasiness about the future of America
is a frequently encountered feeling today. One can find all sorts
of beliefs to go with that feeling of uneasiness: that labor is get-
ting too strong, or that it is getting too weak, i.e., that there is
no effective left-wing political force in America today; that new
technology is coming on at too fast a clip, or that it isn't coming
fast enough to give us the absolutely essential rate of increase in
productivity; that we are losing out to the Russians in the race
for world leadership, or that our very success in "Americanizing"
the rest of the world leaves us with a heavier burden of respon-
sibilities than we can possibly bear; that the closeness and uni-
formity of present-day life destroys individuality and creates
deadly conformity, or that the dissolution of close family and
community ties leaves us a nation of isolated and alienated in-
dividuals, victims of anomie.

: The Reality and the Promise

No matter how the diagnosis goes, there is one universal pre-
iption for treatment: more and better education. This demand
a higher level of knowledge and morality in the American
ople hits many groups politicians, publicists, parents, and
^achers but it falls most strongly on the educationists. The
ucationists, those who administer and teach in the schools of
s country, have for very understandable reasons dodged and
isted in an attempt to escape the enormous responsibility that
3 American people have put on their schools. They have spe-
lized their functions; they have taken refuge in technical prog-
is without concern for the ends to be served by the techniques;
sy have worked themselves and their students harder and
rder, often without considering whether the work has genuine
nificance or not.

[n all honesty, we should have said "we 9 * rather than "they,"
we too are educationists, involved in the occasionally over-
lelming task of giving graduate training to those who will go
to positions of leadership and authority in the schools of this
intry. At times we tried all of the dodges ourselves. But for
j past five years, in giving a seminar for doctoral candidates
m all fields, we have been forced to consider American society
I education, not in our technical capacities as anthropologist
I philosopher, but directly as educationists and citizens. We
ind ourselves compelled to examine the fundamental nature
American life today and the kind of education which that life
[uires.

n a very clear sense, we have been seeking the basis for a
ilosophy of education appropriate to our times* By a philosophy
education we mean a set of ideas that answer two basic ques-
as: What part of our present culture is truly worth transmitting
the next generation? What methods of teaching, carried on in
at institutional arrangements, will be effective in transmitting
sse most precious parts of our heritage?

Questions of this magnitude have engaged the attention of
jculative philosophers ever since the days of Socrates. But at
time have such questions had the practical importance that

Education and Commitment in Contemporary America : 5

they have today. The experience of this century has not only shat-
tered the traditional wisdom of our culture but has also left a
residue of corrosive skepticism that destroys all ideological and
Utopian approaches to fundamental problems of education. Lack-
ing a stable tradition, immune to ideology, our schools have to
find their practical policies in rational, systematically formulated
ideas. We have discovered in our teaching that truly workable,
useful ideas, in turn, can come only from a fresh and wholly dis-
illusioned view of the new culture emerging in America today.

In seeking such a view, we were immediately struck with two
facts about American life that seem to us to be of utmost impor-
tance. The first is our enormous capacity to concentrate energy
and maintain order; the second is the increasingly problematical
nature of commitment in the men and women of our nation. These
two gross facts are not of the same order, really. The first is an
objective, demonstrable state of affairs; the second is more sub-
jective and its truth must be felt rather than seen. But taken
together these two facts go a long way to reveal the unique char-
acter of American life and education.

THE OBDER AND ENERGY OF AMERICAN LIFE

It is tempting to borrow a metaphor from physics in describing
the phenomenon of the order and energy of American life, re-
minding ourselves that a system in a state of entropy exhibits
purely random distribution of energy complete disorder and in-
capacity for any useful work and that an increase in negative
entropy signifies pattern, organization, and capacity for doing
work. The striking fact about America is that it does work. Max
Lerner calls America a success, and in both senses of "does work,"
he is correct. 1

The use of terms from physics, however, may have an unfor-
tunate consequence of focusing attention exclusively on the
mechanical or technological features of the order of American
life, yet nothing would lead further from the truth of our situ-
ation. Our order is first and last a social order, even a moral

6 : The Reality and the Promise

order. Its physical manifestations are impressive, surely, but
equally so are its less visible phenomena. Let us consider our
new super-highways from both of these perspectives. First, these
endless miles of constantly but gently banked curves flow to-
gether to form the finest, perhaps the only truly communal ar-
chitecture in the country today. As sturdy as the roads of Rome,
they are infinitely more complex; for the pace is not that of the
man afoot but of two-to-twenty-ton masses constantly interweav-
ing themselves in diverse lateral patterns while hurtling longi-
tudinally at a mile a minute. The visual field of the driver must
have diversity and interest within an undistracting unity. This
necessity comes not from esthetic requirements but from the
precarious dynamics of the driver's position and the need to
keep him alive. A system for communicating to the driver has
to be devised, a system that will enable him to receive compli-
cated information and instruction from both the natural signs and
the constructed symbols that constantly flow into his visual field.
In contemporary highway construction, art and engineering face
problems undreamt of by the builders of an earlier day. Despite
the ugly, boring, and awkward sections to be found on our high-
ways, the very concentration of energy required to put them
there is a dramatic expression of the technological order in
American life.

Keeping that image in mind, let us look from our other per-
spective to see the social and moral order of America. Two great
tragic novels appearing in the IQSO'S were written by Russians,
each a marginal man in the culture he portrayed in his work.
In Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago the railroad is the dominant
symbol as well as a frequent setting of the story. Without the
images of the hesitant locomotive, the long and frightening tracks,
the tedious life of the switch house, the abandoned freight car,
the crowded Moscow station, and the womblike sleeping car
isolating and protecting its occupants from the Russian winter
night without these images, Dr. Zhivago loses its organic re-
lation to the Russian countryside and to the unconscious mo-
tivations of the Russian people.

Education and Commitment in Contemporary America : 7

The American counterpart to all this is the highway system tin-
folded by Nabokov's Lolita. Both the brilliant comedy and the
oppressive sense o depravity of this book depend upon the
automobile and the social system that is inseparable from it
Though killing -with an automobile may in itself be innocent, it
is significantly that accident which sets the moral debauchery
and ultimately tragic action into motion. But it is not the physical
entity the automobile itself that provides the setting for
Humbert's villainy; it is rather the highway as a social system:
that marevlously far-flung, elaborate, and elastic network of
roads, motels, service facilities, entertainments, and natural won-
ders. In this system, one can live as anonymously as the remotest
hermit, and a great deal more comfortably. For the system is
orderly, efficient, and above all, innocent. Nabokov's story re-
quires the contrast of the innocence and orderliness of the high-
way system with the sordid and chaotic uses secured by it.
(The author's genius with dialect makes the telling of this tale
hilariously funny, and thus he achieves the sympathy and dis-
tance without which the reader could not live with the story. )

Innocence and order constitute no substitute for an adult, self-
conscious morality. The system can protect a Humbert and
Lolita from cold and hunger, from plagues and diseases, from
thieves and bullies. But it cannot protect from anxiety and de-
gradation. Even before Humbert's sexual peculiarities had ever
touched her, Lolita was already prey to comic books and Coca-
Cola, Judging from the minds of the adults around her, Lolita's
precocious knowledge of good and evil could never have grown
into a mature, self-conscious morality. Untouched by Humbert
she would have become, like her mother and like the highway
system itself, immensely decent and obliging but sinfully naive.

Literary expression only extends the statistical view of the
American highway system. Millions upon millions of passenger
miles are traveled upon it each year, with an accident rate that
should be a source of amazement for being the world's lowest.
By far the largest part of these miles are traveled in cars that are

8 : The Reality and the Promise

paid for with astounding regularity, month by month. (A month
is a long time psychologically. ) Without any visible exchange of
money, automobiles are provided their requisite supply of spe-
cially prepared petroleum and their occupants with only less well-
prepared room and board. A tenuous minimum of physical bolts
and bars assures a degree of safety to person and property that
enables the traveler to sleep without fear. The handsomely out-
fitted patrolman represents the very wide, the very formal, limits
of the system within which the American traveler may pursue
his own ends (even debauchery) with a rare combination of
security and freedom.

We are all travelers, whether we use the highways or not.
Our cities are being rebuilt as termini to the concrete and
asphalt ribbons that connect them. Even our schools are com-
ing to be designed as motels, not only in the obvious architec-
tural sense, but more importantly in a scholastic sense, One must
be able to find in any school one enters the same standard fare
that one left at the last school down the road. With almost one-
fifth of our youngsters changing schools each year, there must
be a basically standard curriculum, a standard rating system,
a standard set of rewards and punishments. It should be pointed
out, however, that where there is a basic difference between the
mobility culture of America as a whole and the aspirations of a
locality, as in the racial ghettos of our large cities, the standard
fare is a failure. We have yet to design anything appropriate
for areas like these.

From the highway system, to the mutual funds of the stock
market, to the courtship system in college indeed, at whatever
aspect of American life one looks the dominant fact is the
same: the big beat of constant movement and withal an im-
mense orderliness and capacity for work. We are not efficient
in detail; what concerns us is capacity. Our courtship system,
for example, is extremely inefficient when our divorce rate is
measured against the ideal of monogamy. But it possesses great
capacity: very few unmarried men and women, and an extraor-
dinarily low rate of illegitimate births.

Education and Commitment in Contemporary America : 9

Order, system, and capacity show the negative entropy. This
is not to say, of course, that the order we have achieved is good
in any final sense. We should probably be well advised tech-
nologically to spend more money on railroads and less on high-
ways. We probably overextend credit; we very likely have an
unrealistic courtship system; and unquestionably our school
curriculum needs drastic modification away from the Howard
Johnson-like set of uniform options. But before commending or
condemning the system, one must understand it And to un-
derstand it, one must experience the full heart-tugging sense that
it does work.

But how are we to understand its working? The stale flatness
of our ancient verities is not relieved by having them pronounced
ever more ceremoniously from Pennsylvania and Madison Ave-
nues. Nor can the innocent orderliness of Lolitas highway sub-
stitute for an elaborate system of moral concepts that should
both describe and extend the moral system in our society. We
could, of course, live the commitment of contemporary America
without ever formulating it; but we could not sift, evaluate, and
deliberately teach this commitment of our strange and wonder-
working culture without finding the words that express it. If we
are to have a rationally grounded answer to our question, "What
part of our existent culture is truly worth transmitting to the
next generation?" then we must find adequate terms and concepts
by which to understand ourselves.

COMMITMENT AND THE JOY OF LIVING

If we could avoid the word commitment altogether our task of
explaining the nature of American culture would be easier, but
unfortunately, our resulting comprehension would be much
poorer. Let us begin with the simplest common sense notion of
commitment: when we say that a person is committed to some-
thing, we mean that he has a rather clear goal or purpose in
mind, that he is willing to work hard and sacrifice present enjoy-

10 : The Reality and the Promise

ments for the sake of that goal or purpose. We take commitments
to be desirable things, and thus we mean it to be damning
when we say of someone that he is lacking in commitment. Com-
mitments are arguable: "Ought you to commit yourself to that
end?" is a perfectly reasonable question, even though the only
way one can justify any questioned commitment is by showing
that it fits well with his other commitments. We take it to be a
mark of a mature, healthy person that his commitments have a
degree of stability and permanence such that, even as he adapts
flexibly to the exigencies of his immediate situation, the pattern
and order of his commitments remain unchanged.

Thus there is nothing mysterious in the meaning of the word
commitment. Used in this common sense way it stands for some-
thing quite real, the presence (or absence) of which we can
note easily in our own lives and in the lives of others around
us. But there is something quite problematical about commitment
in contemporary American society, specifically the relation of
the individual's commitment to the larger social system of which
he is a part. Let us look again to the American highway. Focus
attention on a particular individual: the waitress in a diner, the
operator of a giant crane on a construction crew, the musician
hurrying to his evening's engagement. Each of these persons
does his job well or poorly, attentively or thoughtlessly, with or
without discrimination and taste, and in doing his job, contributes
to the maintenance and enhancement of an enormous social
system. Yet each is as unaware of the system he supports as is
the kangaroo of the system of natural selection that made its
evolution possible.

The deliberate economic activities of men and women will
come most easily to mind, but in all spheres of life there is sys-
tem. The mother who now rewards, now punishes, her child is
forming personality in ways peculiarly suited to this social order.
She is responding to a social definition of right and proper be-
havior that enters her consciousness at a far more profound level
than does the reinforcing jargon she picks up through her
women's magazines. The teacher whose conscious, explicit task

Education and Commitment m Contemporary America : 11

is to teach the elements of arithmetical calculation is contributing
to the ongoing o the system, not only by doing that but also, and
perhaps more significantly, by representing a conception of au-
thority essential to the land of social order in the larger corporate
world. The teen-age girl whose main concern is to be attractive to
certain of the young males around her is playing her role in
preserving the somewhat absurd system of courtship in America;
that courtship system in turn makes possible the even stranger
family system which we enjoy and without which the nation
simply could not work at all.

We may presume that each of these persons has definite and
personally accepted commitments. But would they, if asked,
say that they are committed to the social system which, as a
matter of fact, they serve? It is not likely that they would. For
very few in contemporary America is it the case that their society
its welfare and enchancement is the primary object of com-
mitment.

Can a social system survive without being the object of its
members' commitments? Obviously it can. There is nothing more
mysterious about this than about the kangaroo's behavior con-
tributing to the survival of its species without its being committed
to anything at all

Well, is it ever the case that individuals are committed to
the social system of which they are a part? Apparently yes, al-
though as Soviet educators have discovered, it is extremely diffi-
cult to teach a sense of commitment to a vast, technologically
advanced, urban, industrial social order. It is somewhat doubtful
that Soviet educators have even as much conception of the true
nature of their social order (as opposed to an ideology about it)
as do American educators about their own society. But in
smaller, less radically mobile societies, where social myths have
a living, organic relation to the everyday life of people, a full
identity of individual commitment and social system is possible.

Is not the creation of integrated commitment like that of
simpler societies a prime desideratum for contemporary America?

12 : The Reality and the Promise

Not at all. Why should life be simple instead of complex? (The
urge to lose oneself in a larger whole, whether this comes to be
an urge for religious communion or social integration, is a death
urge. We are not projecting that urge into a social analysis.)
Freedom requires that we maintain our radical pluralism.

To us the disturbing feature about contemporary American
society is something quite different: that in pursuing their own
commitments, individual American men and women are not
achieving a satisfying sense of each being a man or a woman
related in a definite way to other men and women and to young
people and old. The heterogeneity, the pluralism, the absence
of national purposes to which individuals must sacrifice them-
selves these can be, and for many are, sources of great personal
freedom and satisfaction. But before an individual can make
creative use of tie freedom and energy available to Americans,
he must himself become a free and powerful person. Despite
the presence of a viable and resilient social structure, individual-
ity is not flourishing. When we look for the causes of its ab-
sence, what we see is that something like a geological fault is
developing between men and women and, at a ninety-degree
angle to that, another fault between children and adults. All
the talk about "improving communications" seems to have little
effect on these ruptures. Their causes lie much deeper, ultimately
in that very social system of orderliness and capacity com-
pounded with incessant movement that is so manifest along our
highways.

We have used the metaphor of the geological fault to point
up a certain psychical isolation. In the current emphasis upon
selfhood we may view a manifestation of that isolation. Unfortu-
nately, the major spokesmen for the contemporary cult of self
exacerbate the symptoms, 2 for they ignore the fact that true
individuality can exist only in the context of identifiable roles
within a social system. The definition of roles by generations
should make explicit the responsibilities of the older to trans-
mit the heritage, to share the obligations, and to state expectable
costs and rewards in personal and social terms. And each sex must

Education and Commitment in Contemporary America j 13

do the same for its members. The young must be claimed for
both adulthood and their respective sex roles. Neither individual
introspection nor peer group membership can perform this
function. Our failure to carry out the requirements of our roles
has left the young with a sense of abandonment, and our inability
to transmit sexual identity reflects our own deficiencies. In purely
spatial terms, the sexes and generations are very likely in as
close contact now as they ever were. The much taunted "together-
ness" of the American family is, among other things, a physical
fact, both required and exploited by the larger social system
through which the family moves.

Being lonely in a crowd has ever been a lure and a curse of
urban living. What struck us so intensely are the desperate efforts
all around us to escape this loneliness, efforts which seem to
lack any sense of the source of the difficulty, any rational basis
by which individuals can free themselves from the unseen pres-
sures and strains that make them move like leaves in a wind-
storm. Such a condition can only be viewed as morbid.

What are the schools doing about all this? They are doing
what needs to be done to keep the social system operating, but
they are not teaching young men and women to understand and
possibly control the society of which they are a part

What the schools are doing has been demonstrated time and
again since 1945 in their responsiveness to social demands. Both
the increase in college and university enrollments and the ex-
pansion of noncollege post-secondary education have been extra-
ordinary and, in each case, directly related to social needs for
technically trained and properly, albeit undramatically, motivated
manpower. American education, like the rest of American so-
ciety, does work.

But what the schools are failing to do is not so easy to see and
feel. Are they teaching young men and women the truth about
this America we have created? Are they helping them to know
why they find themselves so out of touch with their parents?
Why do students find it so enormously difficult to foresee them-

14 : The Reality and the Promise

selves surely and easily in their mature positions as men and
women? Why do the old social myths and rituals seem so foreign
to their sense and senses? Why are they being herded into
church and bombarded with religious slogans? Why have their
school marks taken on such an urgency, especially in the anxie-
ties of their parents? Have our youngsters been taught relevant
ways of answering these questions? The only accurate response,
it seems to us, is a simple No. However well our schools have
done what is necessary to keep the American society moving,
they have not transmitted an accurate consciousness of that
society to its younger members.

As we try to ask how the schools might help to relieve the
morbidity of American life, we must rid ourselves of the com-
mon illusion that it arises in the personal deficiencies of indivi-
dual citizens. Now that we know rather a good deal about how
it is that attitudes are engendered and modified, we might be
tempted to take a "human engineering" approach to the problem
and try to change individual attitudes that we find unhealthy.
But to do so would be only to attack symptoms and to leave
the basic pathology untouched. There is no evidence that, in-
dividually or collectively, Americans are any less committed
to high and noble goals now than they ever were, or that they
are less committed to worthy purposes than are, say, the citizens
of the RSFSR. As we have used the common sense notion of
commitment, it does make perfect sense to speak of degrees of
commitment; but in none of the pathological aspects of American
life does it appear reasonable to think that merely increasing
the degree of commitment among individuals is going to relieve
the pathology. Indeed, insofar as "human engineering" techniques
merely change individual attitudes without modifying the ex-
istential conditions in which these attitudes are expressed, the
use of these techniques will undoubtedly do more harm than
good.

Treating the problem of commitment in America as if it were
a matter of increasing attitudinal devotion to more worthy objects
is completely wrong. From this it does not follow that we are

Education and Commitment in Contemporary America : 15

upholding the so-called "social reconstructionist" argument That
argument and ours would march together in rejecting the efficacy
of individual therapy as the main goal of socially significant edu-
cation. But the social reconstructionist would then go on to talk
about the need for a school that will undertake not only to
modify individual commitments but also to change the social
order, to transform the social system into something that it now
is not There is this much to be said for the social reconstruction-
ist: he does recognize, at least implicitly, the need for a concept
of commitment that is more sophisticated and flexible than is the
common sense notion we have employed to this point. He recog-
nizes the dependency of individual attitudes on the external
social conditions that sustain them. But he peculiarly fails to
understand that whatever potential influence in social change
the school may possess comes from its close, interdependent in-
volvement with all the other institutions in the society. The
school can no more stand apart and exert an independent lever-
age on society than can the tobacco industry, just to take a
counter-case that is roughly comparable in size. But with its close
and functional ties to other clusters of institutional power, the
distinctive kind of school that has evolved in America is a power-
ful force in shaping our distinctive civilization.

This gives us the clue to a more precise definition of what we
mean by the "problem" of commitment in contemporary America.
In a stable, ordered, well-knit society, commitments of individuals
are at the same time expressive of well-defined roles and height-
ened individuality. With us, this is seldom the case. Our indivi-
dual commitments do organize themselves into a dynamically
stable social order, one that reproduces itself at the same time
that it changes in almost every detail, generation by generation.
But do the commitments of individual men and women in this
system sustain and enhance individuality? Does a man's com-
mitment in this system add zest and dignity to the sense of
being a man? A woman's to being a woman? Do a young
man's commitments enable him to see his own strength and

16 : The Reality and the Promise

pride reflected in his father's past, his children's future? Does a
woman's present commitment to her family make it possible for
her to face the inevitable loss of her children and her own
youth with grace and self-compassion? The fact that the social
system works is no guarantee that these questions will be an-
swered affirmatively. In fact, of course, these questions are not
often answered affirmatively. In that lies the problem of commit-
ment in contemporary America.

LEARNING ASSENT TO AMERICA: A PERSONAL NOTE

Despite our abhorrence of jeremiads, we must express just this
once our sense of foreboding: unless we can find an educational
solution to the problem of commitment (as suggested above),
then the wonderfully dynamic, ordered, and free society of
America will neither achieve nor merit long continuation. Per-
haps we may be allowed a few personal words to explain our
attitude. Like most Americans who have tried to make sense of
the bewildering world around them, we went through a pro-
nounced and (with the aid of hindsight) predictable cycle. As
we sought a panoramic vision of American life, what caught
our attention most strongly at first was evidence of the enormous
psychical costs that our civilization demands of its citizens. Our
strategic vantage point in the educational system of America,
as well as considerable time abroad over the years, enabled us
to see with shocking clarity what America was doing to people.
The experience left us for a time curiously cynical and hostile.
There were times when the direct question, "What distinctively
American traits in contemporary culture are worth preserving?"
would have drawn an equally direct "None!" for an answer.
But we are suited neither by training nor temperament to be con-
sistent nihilists. As we gradually learned to see and to describe
the system of American life with at least partial success, we also
came to know and value the goods which cost Americans so
dearly in the currency of the soul. At the end of this cycle, there

Education and Commitment in Contemporary America : 17

was an uncanny shock of recognition as we read these words
by Raymond Williams:

A very large part of our intellectual life, to say nothing
of our social practice, is devoted to criticizing the long
revolution. , . . But as the revolution itself extends, until
nobody can escape it, this whole drift seems increasingly
irrelevant In naming the great process of change in the long
revolution, I am tying to learn assent to it, an adequate
assent of mind and spirit. I find increasingly that the val-
ues and meanings I need are all in this process of change.
If it is pointed out in traditional terms, that democracy,
industry, and extended communications are all means rather
than ends, I reply that this, precisely, is their revolutionary
character, and that to realize and accept this requires new
ways of thinking and feeling, new conceptions of relation-
ships, which we must try to explore. 3

We did, in our own way, learn assent to this new society, a
society that offers no fixed and eternal ends in life, but only
powerful, dynamic means, as its major gifts to the individuals
that make it up. Having learned this for ourselves, we felt the
burden that Richard Pares assigned to

the historian in the modern world one thing at least he
can do is to dispel the stupor and allay the anguish with
which our older and feebler society views the rise of newer,
and, for the purpose, more efficient social and political forms
whose ideas of right and wrong so baffle us. 4

In America, at least, the stupor needs to be dispelled and the
anguish allayed more among the young than the old. It is those
whom David Riesman called the "uncommitted generation" who
most need to learn assent to the new and efficient social forms
that surround them. 5

Learning assent to the new society does not mean easy and
passive acceptance of the status quo, a facile adjustment to life
as it is encountered in the immediate vicinity. It does mean tak-
ing one's full part in the impersonal, complex (and therefore
overwhelming) public, corporate world, as well as in the intensely

18 : The Reality and the Promise

personal, private (and therefore overwhelming) world of the
mobile small family. In short, it means knowing the costs of
modern life and being willing to pay them on demand. Believing
that the world is worth the cost, we direct this book toward a
conception of education through which our youth may learn
assent to America.

2

EDUCATION

AND THE

TRANSFORMATION

OF AMERICA

American education has come under intense and usually ad-
versely critical examination over the past decade. Among pro-
fessional educators, at least, there is a feeling that they have
been unfairly charged with ills for which their responsibility is
a minor one at best. It does seem more than a trifle absurd to
credit Russian successes in space exploration to a failure of
American schools or to attribute juvenile delinquency to school
organization and curriculum. However ludicrous such charges
may be, they are a clear, albeit backhanded, tribute to the belief
that the educational process is a significant and perhaps even
central aspect of contemporary society. (Educators have been
making such claims for quite some time, although they hardly
expected the acceptance of their assertions to return home in
such force and number and under such unfavorable circum-
stances. )

20 : The Reality and the Promise

American education presents, in fact, a spectacle of confusion
that would be humorous to any observer who could take a de-
tached view of it. Critics of the school abound, and each attacks
his particular bete noire as if it were the whole of American
education. The educationists smart under the attacks but suffer
mostly in silence. Occasionally, however, one will speak out,
chiefly to defend the main lines of educational doctrine that
exercised the imagination and captured the loyalty of the pre-
ceding generation of school leaders.

This alternating current of reproach, sometimes labeled the
Great Debate, 1 is pure smoke; the real fire is altogether some-
where else. Unaffected by the attackers and defenders of older
educational doctrines, a genuine transformation of teaching is
occurring, a transformation perhaps more rapid and profound
than anything comparable in the history of deliberate education.
But in a manner which we can only regard as tragic, their very
success in freeing themselves from outmoded controversies has
left those who are most effectively changing our schools oblivious
and unconcerned about the basic questions of how an educational
system ought to serve its society. And all this is going on just
as some students of American society are giving us the only
original analyses of our national life to appear since the intel-
lectuals' response to depression and totalitarianism in the 1930*8,
but unfortunately, and in contrast to the earlier period, con-
temporary students of America often have the most naive views
about education.

As we turn to the first group of players in this comedy of
errors, the well-publicized critics of American schools, we shall
not attempt to classify all the different charges that have been
made against the schools nor to separate the spurious from the
valid. The mere listing of accusations would be an interminable
task, and no evaluation of their merits could escape the limita-
tions imposed by personal prejudices. Let the obvious be recog-
nized: any critic can spice his argument with a recital of the
stupidities (if not worse) that occasionally issue forth from
the mouths of educators; he can list the foolish activities to

Education and the Transformation of America : 21

which children are sometimes subject in the name of education.
Such occurrences are lamentable and, in their mere existence,
are more frequent than they should be. Happily, the effect of
these lapses on the fate of nations and the excellence of our
educational system is insignificant.

Our concern with the controversy explicitly directed toward
the conduct of schools is of a different sort. Its relevance to
our thesis is in revealing a most peculiar difference between
what is and what is not being said about education. We are
faced here with an almost inexplicable conceptual opacity:
within the great volume of literature on education that has
appeared in the past few years, almost all of the issues or
problems adduced for public discussion have little or nothing
to do with the major urgencies that confront us as a nation.
This is so regardless of whether one looks at critics or at de-
fenders of current programs of public schooling.

SAMPLING THE CRITICAL LITERATURE ON EDUCATION

The most frequent accusation is that the schools are neglecting
the teaching of subject matter in favor of a "life adjustment"
approach, with the consequence that students receive a watered-
down program which provides little challenge to their abilities,
is repetitious, and results in boredom for too many, if not all,
of them. Arthur E. Bestor, Jr., historian at the University of
Illinois and among the first of the present-day academicians to
raise a hue and cry about educational conditions, lays the blame
squarely on the educationists and charges them with empire-
building motives that are in effect, if not in intent, destructive
of the fundamental intellectual purposes for which schools are
founded. The power exercised by educational administrators in-
creases as the school becomes all things to all men, a center
for providing services ranging from hot lunches to psychiatric
counseling. Under these conditions, says Bestor, education be-
comes merely one among many activities of the school, and its

22 : The Reality and the Promise

relative importance often declines to less than that of the foot-
ball game.

Bestor's reasoning lias changed somewhat during the ten years
that lie has stood as the chief spokesman for those members of
the academic community who find intellect submerged in tlie
multitudinous activities of mass public schooling, but on at least
two points he has remained completely consistent: that it is the
moral duty of a democratic society to give its best education
to all its youth, and that the best education is one that promotes
the ideal of disciplined intelligence. 2 It would be impossible for
anyone of good will and intellect to deny either of these points
were it not for the fact that Mr. Bestor more than occasionally
identifies the ideal of disciplined intelligence with a mastery of a
limited number of academic disciplines as taught professionally
in graduate schools. 3 Now clearly one is not necessarily a knave
or a fool to deny that identification, and over the years Mr.
Bestor has shown, quite fortunately, a lessening tendency to
treat all who disagree with him as if they were both.

Nevertheless, in his finer moments, Arthur Bestor may be
called the moral conscience of American education; on the
other hand, Jacques Barzun is its perpetual gadfly. Like Bestor,
his views have changed over the twenty-odd years that he has
been teacher, administrator, and critic of anti-intellectualism
in American education. Unlike Bestor, Mr. Barzun has become
more biting and less charitable over the years. 4 He has been
placed, as Mr. Bestor has not, in positions of great political
power in the academic world; and perhaps from that vantage
point, the enemies of intellect seem more sharply defined than
they would to a mere professor. Barzun's most important con-
tribution to this debate is to reveal the shallow cant and hypocrisy
in so much of our talk about education. The older symbols
have lost their meaning, as Barzun shows with acid charm. But
where may we find meaningful ways to analyze and guide our
educational activities? Mr. Barzun does not tell us. Like his
masters, Rabelais and Montaigne, he is content to reveal the
follies of the world, leaving it to others to reform it. 5

Education and the Transformation of America : 23

John Gardner tries to do what Mr. Barzun does not. Of all
the contemporary commentators on American education, Mr.
Gardner most deserves the title "classicist," for the model of
argument of his recent book, Excellence, stems directly from
Plato and, more specifically, Aristotle. According to Gardner
there is an excellence Le., arete or virtus in every human
activity requiring that each individual have the education most
appropriate to his own talents and capacities. In this way, not
only can the whole complex range of activities in a modern
society be performed excellently, but each individual can at the
same time achieve his own maximum self-fulfillment. 6

But Mr. Gardner's excellent prose tends to gloss over rather
than genuinely reconcile the deep contradictions in American
life and education: the contradictions between liberal education
and vocational training; between the ideal of critical intelligence
and the need for immediate and unquestioning obedience in
the body politic; between the commitments inherent in the
idea of a public world and our devotion to personal values in
private life. A moment's reflection should convince that these
conflicts are not going to be eliminated merely by pursuing
excellence in all fields. In fact, there is something rather odd
about the very expression "Pursuit of Excellence" which Mr.
Gardner used as the title of a little tract he prepared for a
Rockefeller study commission. One may pursue truth, beauty,
property, or even, as the Declaration of Independence would
have it, happiness. But excellence? Excellence, as Aristotle recog-
nized, is a quality that inheres in activity when suitable means
are employed for good ends. Mr. Gardner simply did not follow
his Hellenic mentor far enough. For Aristotle makes it clear that
schools do not, cannot, pursue excellence in general, but rather
any school must serve a particular concept of excellence accord-
ing to the nature of the society supporting that school. And
despite his well-grounded, realistic portrayal of American life
overall, Mr. Gardner fails to relate that portrayal to a clear con-
ception of ends and means in education. 7

24 : The Reality and the Promise

In order to realize just how far we are from having clearly
accepted worthy ends for our schools and well-designed means
for their achievement, one has only to follow Martin Mayer's
survey of The Schools. 8 Mr. Mayer's deliberately non-ideological
journalism, his carefully controlled sense of outrage, and his
obvious sympathy for the system, even with its defects, com-
bine to make his work one of genuine revelation. We see through
his eyes, as we could not perhaps from another perspective, the
shocking degree to which our schools are a vast melange in
which only an occasional teacher evokes a wonderful but fleeting
climate of critical intelligence. We see also that in this social
reality, a graceful eulogy to excellence is totally inadequate as a
basis for reform to achieve the high ideals Mr. Bestor forces us
to acknowledge as the rightful goals of American schools.

Nor are we likely to find an intelligible rationale for our
rapidly changing school system in James Bryant Conant's many
writings on American education. Mr. Conant, as a matter of fact,
deliberately rejects the idea that our schools actually need any
rationale other than their on-going, immediate objectives. 9 In
view of Mr. Conant's distinguished service to his nation as
scientist, university president, diplomat, and now senior states-
man of education, one can understand both why he should take
the perpetuation of the system as its own sufficient justification
and also why, for others who lack his by now intuitive sense
of just what the system is and why it works as it does, his
writings are mischievously superficial. This is not to deny that
there is great merit in taking the presently feasible and practical
steps to improve the system as Mr. Conant suggests. But we are
poorly served if we take those steps to be sufficient excuse for
ignoring the task of appraising the worth of the present school
system in relation to the larger educational needs of our changing
society. 10

Although school people have been acutely sensitive to the
varied denunciations of their shortcomings, they have been
notably unsuccessful in getting their case before the public. An
effort in this direction is made by Raymond P. Harris, in a very

Education and the Transformation of America : 25

pleasantly written volume entitled American Education: Facts,
Fancies, and Folklore. Mr. Harris, who is director of secondary
education in Mount Vernon, New York, shows clearly that most
of the charges against the public schools are overdrawn, many
to the point of being ridiculous; he implies, though he is too
much a gentleman to assert, that a great deal of the anti-public
school folklore is perpetuated in print by those whose economic,
religious, and social class interests are not well served by ex-
panding the public schools of this nation. His case in detail is
very persuasive. But overall, the book fails to convince on its
major thesis, namely, that there is nothing wrong with the
present system of schooling that could not be cured by massive
doses of dollars. Even those who are completely and totally de-
voted to the idea of public education find it hard to believe that
under the present set-up only lack of money has stood between
the schools and the really radical changes that would be re-
quired to meet the demands of the new kind of society we are
living in. 11

Among the defenders of public education who have recog-
nized the fundamental nature of problems faced by the schools,
the name of Myron Lieberman must be put in a position of pre-
eminence. Mr. Lieberman recognizes the necessary role of leader-
ship to be played by the professional educators in designing a
really workable national system of schools, and he has the cour-
age to make his case without the usual obeisance to the sacred
cow of local and lay control of public schools. Unlike Mr.
Harris, Mr. Lieberman sees the need for changed political
structure within which adequate financial support for schools
can be secured and adequate policies for spending these funds
established and carried through. But Mr. Lieberman, for his own
good reasons perhaps, has somehow refused to connect his
excellent portrait of education to the larger social framework of
the emerging American society. Seen in the light of the declin-
ing role of local community life in the country and the emerging
dominance of great corporate superstructures in the public world.

26 . The Reality and the Promise

Mr. Lieberman s proposals for increasing the power of the pro-
fessional educator are eminently sensible; 12 without this back-
ground they sound somewhat like the empire-building tactics
among the administrators that Mr. Bestor has fought for so long.
Whatever may be the reason in particular cases, the general
conclusion stands that the shriller the voice of the critic the
more widely, if perhaps fleetingly, his voice may be heard. And
among those who propose reforms, the most likely to be given
attention are those whose schemes are the farthest removed from
the realities of the situation they seek to improve. This latter
condition is not wholly to be deplored, of course; often those
who have the detachment of the complete outsider can be more
effective than those who are too intimately involved in on-going
affairs. The efforts of the Ford Foundation in the improvement
of education are a case in point. With great fanfare about in-
novation and an almost suffocating surfeit of money, the Fund
for the Advancement of Education has spread its activities in
many directions. Operating deliberately and consciously with
no overall theory or ideology, the Fund has implicitly seemed
to subscribe to the idea that in education, as in all other aspects
of American life, improvement comes with advancing the level
of technology and the consequent specialization of labor that
advanced technology requires. This idea is eminently true and
unobjectionable in itself, though in particular applications such
as the use of airborne television in teaching in the Midwest and
the accelerated training of liberal arts graduates for teaching
positions, the final results have not always lived up to advance
notices. If the Fund has been less than zealous in openly report-
ing the exact nature of its activities and their consequences, the
reticence is understandable: its purpose was to serve as impetus
to change, and no one can deny that, positively or negatively, the
purpose has been served. 13

If one asks what has been the total upshot of the critical con-
cern with education in the past few years, the answer would
be hard to give. One comes nearer to discovering lastingly worth-
while outcomes if he turns his eyes away from the magazine

Education and the Transformation of America : 27

articles in which the great weight of the critical literature has
appeared and attends instead to the quietly spectacular move-
ment to reorganize teaching materials in mathematics and the
sciences, in some of the humanities, and more recently in langu-
age instruction. This movement has been aided by grants from
the National Science Foundation for retraining science teachers
in new materials and methods, by the enterprise of certain able
and dedicated individuals, such as Jerrold Zacharias of M.I.T.,
and by concerted efforts of scientific societies, such as the Amer-
ican Institute of Biological Sciences. 14 These stirrings are all
to the good. The isolation of teacher training institutions and
professional educators from the developmental streams of the
sciences and humanities has been too great and has lasted too
long. Renewed concern among academicians is to be welcomed.
The consequences could be something genuinely novel in the
world's educational history: a mass system of elementary and
secondary schools staffed in toto by liberally trained college and
university graduates.

But that inspiring thought is merely a desideratum for the
future. At the moment we can look for a massive impact of cur-
rent efforts to reform teaching only when new text and study
materials get into the regular channels of distribution, when
standard testing devices are reconstructed to take account of the
new materials, and when new technological devices and teaching
machines become normal features of ordinary schools. These
changes are indeed occurring at a rate that would have seemed
impossible only ten or fifteen years ago. They are bringing about
a transformation in teaching, while the attackers and defenders
of the schools are looking the other way.

But basic questions still remain unanswered. Let us suppose
that the effect of the confluence of all these efforts brings new
vitality to the schools, eliminates the boredom, provides chal-
lenges to student intellect, and according to ability, spurs each
student on to excellence. Is the solution to this kind of educational
mopping-up operation the only significant issue which bedevils

28 : The Reality and the Promise

American education? Let us be clear that for the America of
the past our educational system has functioned remarkably well.
No detractor or critic could deny the orderly, massive, and
effective job it has done to prepare, in a generation, the millions
of young from native and alien agrarian backgrounds to partici-
pate in a democratic industrial society. The teachers in the
little one-room country schools, in the tenement-like slum schools
of the cities, in the middle-class urban districts and Main
Street towns, and those who were their mentors deserve our
praise for their accomplishment.

But yesterday is not today. And the America that was, is not.
This fact does not seem to have penetrated the comprehension
of those who are engaged in the controversy about American
education. By implication they have assumed that the world
surrounding the activity of education stands still. They complain
and argue about what is and prescribe what should be, but
they show only slight evidence that their concerns have relevance
within any kind of a dynamic, on-going civilization in which they
live. Neither do they seem to have become aware of, nor so
much as engaged in conversation with, those thinkers and writers
who are also concerned about our civilization although address-
ing themselves to aspects other than educational. We refer to
those who are examining the basic assumptions and direction
of our national life. In the process, these writers dissect the
combinations of power in government and business; they an-
alyze social philosophy, manners, and morals; they even search
for or pronounce upon national purpose. Their writings are
directed toward an educated American public; but in the subtle
ways of a great conversation, each examines the ideas of the
others against the background of his own perspective. There
are five to whom we wish to pay special heed: John Kenneth
Galbraith, David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, W. H. Whyte, Jr.,
and A. A. Berle. And while these five have been chosen for our
special purposes, we nonetheless recognize that many, including
Charles Frankel, Paul TilHch, Margaret Mead, Lewis Mumford,
Peter Drucker, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Henry S. Commager,

Education and the Transformation of America : 2

and W. Lloyd Warner, have made their contributions to the con-
versation.

THE GREAT CONVERSATION

The mood which pervades the conversation about America
is a deeply serious one. But one also senses an underlying opti-
mism which threatens to burst through the recitation of absurdi-
ties, of misplaced energies, and of false values, and to exclaim:
"Look here, America, come to your senses! Can't you see the
greatness that is really yours, if only you will comprehend and
act? We aren't certain; if America fails, it may well be man's
last chance. How sad the waste if we fail! But we have always
made it in the past, surely we will do so again.** Such sentiment
can come only from an almost indescribably deep belief and faith
in America's destiny. It arises in those who are impelled by a
humanitarian dedication which links and extols the dignity of
man and human freedom.

Each in his own way (and sometimes in opposition to the
others) points to the dangers that confront us in the process of
dissecting and anatomizing an America which has all but solved
the problem of physical want, of brutalized personalities, and of
demoralizing inequality. C. Wright Mills prepares us for the
perils that he sees by submitting evidence to establish that there
are three great centers of power: government, business, and the
military. He argues that major decisions affecting foreign and
domestic policy and the allocation of wealth and resources are
vested in a handful of men who control these power centers and
who, by virtue of their positions, inevitably find themselves in a
network of official and personal relations, the net effect of which
is to provide the basis for collaboration and mutual support. He
claims that the power they wield is dangerous because it is held
by the mindless and irresponsible, who are not representative
men whom the public can respect But he also condemns the
American system which spawns such irresponsibility. 15 Mr. Milk
sees little to fear in the power of labor unions, for he views their

30 : The Reality and the Promise

influence as partially corrective to the larger, more powerful
concentration of the corporate world. What he fails to see, how-
ever, is that unions are in reality an integral part of the big-
business complex, that the symbiotic relation between them and
industrial corporations mutually reinforces and creates the power
of botibu Although difference of position is reaffirmed in recur-
rent contract negotiations these events may also be viewed as
ritual performances which assert and strengthen the interde-
pendence between labor and management Hence, any enumera-
tion of the power elite, we believe, must also list the Meanys, the
Reuthers, and the Hoffas.

John Kenneth Galbraith exhibits little of the fearful trepida-
tion about concentrated power which infects Mills. He believes
that the force of countervailing power, sometimes exercised by
consumer, sometimes by government, sometimes by unions, some-
times in fact by business itself, acts to maintain a balance and
prevent monolithic centralization. 16 But he grants that hazards
exist and warns us of the paradoxes in our affluent society. He
believes that the conventional understandings of our economic
system must be modified if we are to avoid heading for serious
trouble. He insists that however well the emphasis on production
for private consumption has served us in the past, we must now
put much more of our capital into the public sphere of the
economy, devote much greater wealth in the future to social
goods: education, recreation, health, and all those communal
services which are essential to building personal resources. 17

A. A. Berle's longstanding interest in the modern corporation
has led him along a route which began with anxieties about the
concentration of power and at the moment leaves him with
admiration. 18 He grants that those who manage these great
oligarchies "hold the reins" but that their position is to be
"essentially non-Statist civil servants unless they abuse their
power to make themselves something else/* If this should happen,
the obvious remedy, he contends, is to change the managers,
not the system. The creation of a new class of professional man-
agers and the separation of control from ownership neutralizes

Education and the Transformation of America ; 31

the power once inherent in wealth. In addition, not only is
wealth more widely distributed through share ownership, but
it is also increasingly concentrated in collectively owned fiduciary
institutions which maintain a hands-oil policy toward corporate
management. The new position of the corporation has created a
situation in which business and government can no longer really
be separated, and through government the public has direct
means of control over the misuse of power if the occasion should
ever warrant this. Berle's faith lies in the efficacy of consensus. 19

Where Mills, Galbraith, and Berle look at American life on
the economic and political level, the field of vision of David
Riesman and William H. Whyte, Jr., is on the personal-inter-
personal level. Riesman probes for (and discovers a lack of) in-
ner resources among those for whom the present system of super-
ficial and fleeting relationships is rewarding. He is far from
happy with his discovery, since the "other-directed," as he labels
them, seek guidance for themselves from their contemporaries,
and hence suffer from a self-imposed behavioral conformity and
are driven by an insatiable need for approval. He attributes the
predominance of this type among middle-class Americans to
external forces associated with capitalism, industrialism, and
urbanization. If his analysis is correct, then we must conclude
that there is little hope to fill the inner emptiness, to dispel the
superficiality which characterizes Americans. Even that slight
ray of hope which he proffers, that other-directed people may
become more "attentive to their own feelings and aspirations/'
can be only a mirage in the deterministic system he posits. 20

The position which William H. Whyte, Jr., assumes in his
analysis of the men of middle management differs little in its
basic criticism and pessimism from that of Riesman. He has
identified and dissected "organization man" for us, and in doing
so has laid stress upon the almost compulsive emphasis which
binds one to the group and, in turn, shapes and colors perception
and behavior. What distresses Whyte is the lack of protest, on
the one hand, at this destruction of individuality and, on the
other hand, the acceptance of conformity as an openly articulated

32 : The Reality and the Promise

moral imperative. The source for the ideology which motivates
the organization man he finds in the structure of industrial
organizations, and his up-by-your-own-bootstraps-and-out-of-the-
bloody-mess solution is as unrealistic as that proposed by
Riesman. 21

Those who have been engaged in this great conversation have
been talking about the consequences of the transformation of
America. They have been concerned with the changes in some
of its institutions, with the obsolescence of some of the support-
ing conventional wisdom which rationalizes behavior in relation
to these institutions, with the effect of these changes upon the
person, and with the relation between ideal goals of an earlier
America and the present. Some, such as Mills, are angry; others,
including Riesman and Whyte perhaps, are pessimistic; 22 others,
Eerie among them, are imbued with a sense of great potentiality
for future good. But without exception, these commentators on
the American scene are deeply disturbed by what they perceive.
Their disturbance is based on no mirage, no fanciful set of un-
realized Utopian values. That they offer no panaceas is a re-
markable testimony to the restraint they have imposed upon the
natural American tendency to evangelize. They do not claim
that the route to salvation may be discovered in known, or as
yet unformulated, dogma. They offer neither Marxism, Christi-
anity, Zen Buddhism, nor Science as the true glory trail. In their
pragmatic faith in intelligence, decent human motivations, and
democratic processes as the base for overcoming difficulties, they
are in the best American tradition.

But what has all of this to do with education and with those
controversialists who have directed their attention toward its
deficiencies and its reform? In one camp, those who are part of
the great conversation have either ignored the distinctive func-
tion of the American school or have treated it as a subsidiary
topic. (Riesman's writings on education have not become part
of the conversation.) 23 In the other camp, educators possessed
of an intense preoccupation with the individual, have remained
blind to the larger social system within which that individual

Education and the Transformation of America : 33

must eventually live out his adult life. Their talk o developing
skills and character to live successfully in and contribute to the
community possesses an unusually hollow ring, as the community
which they hypothesize disappears before their eyes. Their self-
assurance tfiat the school has taken over many functions of the
family, functions lost either by default or by incompetence, be-
speaks their lack of understanding of the place of the family in
today's social world. They are committed to a private conception
of the world, which is unlike anything that really exists.

For these reasons much of the recent discussion around educa-
tion has been mostly beside the point. Of course the techniques
of educational process, in all of their ramifications, must be im-
proved. Of course the shallow platitudes, which some educators
think stand for real life values, must go. But education also
needs to be transformed in a much more profound sense if it is
to serve and be served by the society in which it operates. In
such a world, formal education moves from its peripheral posi-
tion in an agrarian society to a central one. But the transforma-
tion of the educational process and organization is of the same
magnitude as that which accompanied other institutional reforma-
tion in the change from an agrarian society to the present one.
The problems of education and their relation to other aspects of
the society need to be brought into the orbit of the great con-
versation. It is this to which we hope to contribute.

A certain amount of preliminary groundwork is necessary to
establish the conceptual conditions which permit the incorpora-
tion of the discussions about education into the arena of the
great conversation. For educators to be conversant with the
issues economic, political, ethical, or organizational is in it-
self not enough. We may assume that most, if not all of them,
are so informed, although their writings do not reflect this
competence. Nor may we hope that those who are concerned with
other facets of our civilization can elicit from the educational
controversy those clues which illuminate the deep and funda-
mental connection between deliberate education and the fate?
of our way of life. The needed conceptual conditions assume a

34 : The Keality and the Promise

new perspective in which the deep dichotomy which separates
the world of public activity, values, and organization, from that
of the private and personal is fully understood. Only then are
we in a position to assess the function of education in our type
of society; to grasp the intermediate structural position of school
organization between family and our public corporate system;
and to recognize the contribution which the educative process
makes to the individual in his transition from private to public
worlds.

PRIVATE AND PUBLIC WORLDS

The physical expression of contemporary America is found in
metropolis. Massive aggregations of population, with their in-
ternal differentiations in function and activity, now provide the
setting within which life is shaped and its drama played.
Metropolis is above all a milieu of contrasts: of central city and
suburbs; of engulfed satellite towns and villages. Within it are
contained the subtle differences in styles of life manifest in the
graduated range from luxury apartments and town houses to the
teeming slums in the core city, from elegant and sleek ranch-
style and split-level dwellings of suburbia to the cramped, pre-
fabricated box houses of the development. It is a diversity further
exemplified in gleaming new multistoried buildings in which
great varieties of workers plan, direct, and carry on govern-
mental, financial, industrial, even religious and educational ac-
tivities of a complex society; of the functional shopping and
service center; and of the manicured industrial park. Ours is a
richly textured society which offers a greater variety of interests
and opportunities to a greater proportion of its people than any
society the world has known before. The rewards availing those
who do not shun struggle merit a dedicated insistence on making
our institutions perform their jobs well.

Two clearly demarcated systems, differentiated by values,
activity, and organization, bring into structural focus the nearly
endless diversity. From these contrasting and sometimes com-

Education and the Transformation of America : 35

peting ways o life, the American receives from and returns to
aH that fee is. There is the private world of family and friends,
of domestic life and sociability, of home and its environs. Its
harmonies and tensions are rooted in values and expressed in
emotions which are quite separate from the other, outer and
sometimes even hostile, world of the great social superstructures.
These latter the corporately organized activities of industry,
agriculture, finance, business, transportation, government, edu-
cation, religion, and health constitute the public world which
stands counterpoised, structurally and spatially apart, in the
great social and cultural dichotomy which characterizes our
civilization. 24

In an earlier America, and for that portion of the world which
has not yet evolved into an industrial-metropolitan form of society,
the functions of domesticity and community were joined. Hearth
and place of work, whether field or workshop, were symbolically,
if not physically, one. It is in their separation that the great trans-
formation of American society is manifest Today most of us are
participants in each of these two great social systems: the nuclear
family and its extensions, and the great superstructures. Our basic
life rhythm reflects the sharp alternation in time related to space,
activity, association, and even perspective and perception, which
marks the separation between our public and private lives. From
early adulthood, when we are first inducted into office, shop,
market place, or laboratory, until the ultimate separation of re-
tirement or death, we shuttle between abode and place of work.
Inspiration and joy or drudgery and boredom may be found in
both or in neither, and seldom does one or the other make a total
demand on us.

There is as yet little in contemporary Western literature which
directly portrays the conflict in the individual as he is torn be-
tween these two worlds in their demands of allegiance. It is all
too new. Classical Greek tragedy, the story of the Biblical Job,
and the Japanese Kabuki cycle have each dramatized for their
time and place the tension and torment of individuals torn by
conflicting commitment systems. It is true that some among our

36 ; The Reality and the Promise

artists have sensed the inner travail which our civilization creates:
the existentialists have acknowledged their alienation, the beat-
niks have rejected and withdrawn, the neo-Freudians urge love as
panacea, and the message of the great Swedish film director,
Ingmar Bergman, is despair. But nowhere has the stark simplicity
of the conflict been shown with greater clarity and force than
in the screenplay High Noon. Behind its allegorical symbolism
of the struggle between good and evil lies another, deeper, and
more relevant message. For when the ultimate choice is to be
made between the tranquillity and safety of the private world
and the needs of the public world, although he is abandoned by
peers, threatened with rejection by the newly won bride, and
faced with possible death, the committed man's only tenable
moral decision is to defend the values of the public world.

But there is a danger in pushing this analogy of High Noon
too far, for in the frontier western town the morality and the
commitments of the public and private worlds still constituted
one integrated system. In metropolitan civilization values central
to the protection and preservation of the nuclear family may be
antithetical to those of the corporate system, and the metronomic
punctuality demanded by commuter train, factory whistle, or
office clock does not reckon with the more subtle rhythm of crises
within a family.

From the counterpoised position of the public and private sys-
tems, with their variant commitments, arise the tensions, the costs,
and the rewards of our type of society. How well the whole meets
successfully the stated goals of individual and group depends in
a measure unknown in other societies ( including our own agrarian
past) upon the effectiveness of formal education, since prepara-
tion for participation in the public world has now become almost
entirely a function of schooling. Hence the process of learning
and the institutional aspects of education are crucial.

THE EDUCATIVE PROCESS

The educative process, if successful, transforms the individual
through successive stages from infancy to adulthood. It instills

Education and the Transformation of America : 37

in him knowledge and skills and the ability to perceive, evaluate,
and organize the intellectual and feeling capacities. Family,
school, peers, and often the church, all have separate although
usually complementary roles in this activity. The child on his way
to adulthood must, of necessity, be shaped by the experiences
which his environment provides. As the conditions of existence
remain constant or change, so also may we expect that people
too will reflect the life and times of the world around them. In
our response to the on-going events of the large or small social
systems in which we orbit, each of us is molded by the events
in which he is a participant. But we also make up part of the
environment which shapes others. And thus, collectively, we form
the great dynamic repository of mankind's past: the wisdom,
skills, and conceits which are manifest in the present and, with
their accumulations, are carried into the future.

However ignorant we may be of the subtle processes by which
each individual learns to categorize and differentiate, to organize
and use, to take part in and learn from the events of life, we know
that there is growth and change in our environment and that we
are its mirrors. 25 We accept the uniqueness of each individual as
well as the unity of mankind as a species. However much we
may urge pan-humanism, we also recognize that the variations of
genetic inheritance lend distinctions to each person; and that into
the infant's plastic reservoir of unrealized capacities come the
sound and sense which will make him subtly but importantly
different from all other human beings. But within the ego, within
that satisfying knowledge that each of us represents a unique
model, may lurk a serious danger, because the emphasis given
to the individual and to the specific processes which gave him
creation acts to inhibit our ability to see the great system which
^encompasses us all and from which there is no escape, not even
perhaps through death. 2 We are much less well informed on
the workings and characteristics of this system than we are upon
the processes of learning. But we can and must assume that a
relationship exists between the individual as a product of his
cultural environment and the latter as the source of a systematic

38 : The Reality and the Promise

ordering of human activities and values. If this assumption is
correct, and we are convinced that it is, then it is of even greater
importance that we examine learning as a projection from the
social and cultural world, rather than study it as something that
is merely a result of responses by the individual to external
stimuli.

The shift in focus which is proposed here is of tremendous
importance, inasmuch as it holds that the individual can be
understood only if we first comprehend the nature of the systems
which make him a perceiving, believing, and participating mem-
ber of society. The characteristics which distinguish man, as a
solitary individual or within a group, and the activities in which
he engages, whether alone or in cooperation with others, are both
derivations of an external world, a world of relatively stable and
persisting groups whose activities and beliefs are themselves
manifestations of the conditions of time, space, and situation.
The study of the educative process thus may be seen as the
examination of the relation between the systems operating within
a civilization and their effect upon the individual. 27

The arrangements by which we consciously and intentionally
educate our children constitute one of these systems. Its proper
functioning in our civilization is crucial, for although our schools
represent one of the great superstructures, their operational goal
is not that of claiming their clients as future educators but of
preparing them for the great range of institutionally organized
activities which express our social and technical complexities.
Thus, when we teach grammar, history, mathematics, or any
other subject at the pregraduate level, we do not expect that all
students will become grammarians, historians, mathematicians,
and so on. It is for this reason, among others, that the unmodified
downward extension of university subjects is such a questionable
procedure. Few would accept any proposition asserting that the
proper intellectual function of the schools is to prepare subject
matter specialists, and there is an increasing tendency to argue
that neither should this be the function of the four-year college

Education and the Transformation of America : 39

curriculum. What, then, when we speak of the crucial function
of the schools, do we mean? 28

THE TRANSITIONAL FWCTION OF EDUCATION

The perspective we hold is that of the school as a transitional
institution in which the process of education gradually separates
the young from family and locality and prepares them to join the
great corporate systems and to establish their own independent
nuclear families.

But an opponent to our view might pose this challenge: Even
if educators have failed to conceptualize the schools as inter-
positional between the nuclear family and the superstructures,
does not the process of education, in effect, fulfill the transitional
role which you claim is essential? Or a critic of anti-intellectualism
might have this reply to our thesis: Is not rigorous attention to
scholarship, to subject matter, to the cultivation of excellence, just
that aspect of education which will best prepare the student to
participate in, and contribute to, the complex world which you
describe? And those who adhere to life adjustment as the purpose
of education might well ask: Does not the emphasis on "real"
problems develop those inner strengths and values which are
so much needed in this kind of stressful world?

These arguments are not easy to answer because they, too, ,can
degenerate into the "I do you don't" level of discourse, which
solves no problems, however emotionally satisfying such argu-
mentation may be for the cantankerous. We have already recog-
nized and praised the really commendable contribution which
American education has made. Nor have we any quarrel with
insistence upon intellectual development as a central function
of the schools. But we do not believe that the schools can teach
moralistic attitudes, although the student's experiences in the
school setting can reinforce or modify his perspective on the
world. Let catechismal recitation of the good and bad remain
where it is now taught. If all of this be so, then how do we differ
from those we criticize?

40 : The Reality and the Promise

The strategic position of the school rests on two factors. One
is its interstitial position between the nuclear family and the cor-
porate structures of the public world. It is from this position
that it derives its function of separating and directing the in-
dividual in his pre-adult life away from his family and toward
integration in the superstructures. The other factor is based on
the peculiar and unique relation which the educational system
has vis-a-vis the cultural heritage which comprises the technical,
scientific, historical, esthetic, and literary traditions of our society.
The universities with their scholars, scientists, libraries, and
museums have become the ultimate repository for this heritage.
But their function has also been that of extending this knowledge
through research and study. Those who teach in secondary and
elementary schools are directly exposed to this fountainhead in
their training, and they must continue to draw upon these re-
sources if their work is to stay abreast of new developments.
That the strength of these connections has been far less than it
should have is clearly, but unfortunately, exemplified in the con-
tentious sparring between academic and professional educators.
This separation is one which cannot be permitted to continue,
although partially because of their different assumptions about
learning, the reuniting may be difficult. How else can we explain
why the educationists turned not to the university system but to
the industrial corporation when they sought an organizational
model for the public schools? (See Chapter 8.)

In the next several chapters we propose to describe first an
impression of the promise and the portent of America, and to
contrast the post-Civil War America of commercial agrarianism
and Main Street towns with the contemporary scientific and in-
dustrial civilization of great metropolitan centers. This analysis
serves the purpose of establishing the social context within which
education functions and to demonstrate the differential educa-
tional needs as they are related to a social system. In this context,
the progressive education movement may be viewed as a transi-

Education and the Transformation of America : 41

tion between the needs of an agrarian society and the contempo-
rary one.

The last several chapters (Part Two) examine the relation-
ship between education and the commitments our system requires
of the individual and of groups. Here we make explicit the cost
that the continued functioning of our system exacts from the
individual

3

AMERICA:

THE
PROMISED LAND

The development of American civilization has been felt and de-
scribed as a great adventure. For well over a century its republi-
can form of government and democratic participation in political
decisions, its ideal of social equaHtarianism, its renunciation of
hereditary privileges and social constraints which shackled man-
kind to outworn traditionalisms, and its insistence on the right
of the individual to develop and use his capacities have been
guiding stars for Americans and a model of aspiration for much
of the world, or at least so it was believed.

Those who participated in the development of America car-
ried with them a sense of destiny, not unlike that of a Chosen
People in a Promised Land. 1 But inseparable from this view
was the belief that irrespective of the prodigal bounty provided
by God, it was man's responsibility to determine how nature's

America: The Promised Land : 43

benefits were to be used and that upon man himself rested the
necessity for the decision and action that would lead to the
realization o the Utopia. 2 Such basic modification of a static
world view, contained within old-world agrarianism, was un-
doubtedly related to the beginnings of the great outward thrust
of Western civilization, a movement that had origins in a rising
commercialism, the secularization of institutions and thought, and
the emergence of a world view based upon scientific empiricism.
Whatever interpretations are offered for the course of American
civilization, and they are many and complex, the facts are
startlingly clear: today we are witness to the consequences of a
process in cultural evolution that exceeds in magnitude and
significance any previous event in human history, except perhaps
the emergence of man himself as a culture-building and -trans-
mitting creature. 3

The new civilization that is forming around us is so recent
that we do not as yet possess a conceptualization which would
give adequate expression to it. We lack confidence both in our
capacity to perceive the magnitude and scope of the changes
which are brought in the wake of this new civilization and in our
individual significance within its emerging social forms and
values. If we could assume the vantage point of future social
historians, their hindsight would prove of immense help in an-
swering the many questions which confront us. But as we cannot
transport ourselves to the future, our recourse is to examine the
contemporary world in the context of its antecedents, and through
contrast and analysis, inquire whether we remain upon the course
which once we believed would take us to the realization of the
promise.

PROGRESS: TECHNOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL COROLLARIES

The American solution to the problem of human misery arising
from want has been to create an industrial economy capable
of producing a superabundance of goods. In its realization new
forms of human organization were invented and old ones trans-

44 : The Reality and the Promise

formed. The one called for the other, and together they BOW
present a congruence of extraordinary power and potentiality. If
our national genius expressed itself in manipulation and improve-
ment of technological processes, it also appeared in the less fre-
quently commented upon capacity for immediate and effective
organization. In these qualities we were heirs to a British form
of Western civilization, and we and they to an even older cultural
tradition for the technology with which we began.

The basic elements of industrial process are as old as mankind
itself. Simple bone and stone tools, uncovered in deposits dating
back hundreds of thousands of years, attest to man s capabilities
as a fabricator. But improvement upon methods which directly
shaped materials provided by nature has been a slow process at
best. The domestication of plants and animals, discovery or in-
vention of metallurgical processes and the subsequent use of
metal for tools, the invention of the wheel, improvements in the
transportation of goods and people through various water- and
land-borne devices, all marked advances in man's ability to more
efficiently exploit the physical world. 4

The roster of technological innovation, from the earliest be-
ginnings of agrarian culture at about the sixth millenium B.C.
to the time of the Roman Empire, includes most of the mechanical
devices basic to modern industry. The principle of the substitu-
tion of animal and mechanical power for human muscle had been
established. Animals were used to carry or pull loads, the wind
was a supplemental source of energy to the ship's galley slaves,
and water power turned the mill stones that converted grain into
flour. There are severe limitations, however, on the amount of
power that can be generated by teams of draft animals, water
wheels, or wind. Man had merely started the process that could,
in principle, provide him with abundance and with freedom
from physical toil,

When, in the late eighteenth century, James Watt perfected
a practical steam engine that could transfer energy to the pur-
poses of manufacturing and commerce, a revolutionary process
had been achieved. The way was open for the proliferation of

America: The Promised Land : 45

mechanical and energy-producing devices that transferred the
production and transportation of the world's goods from the backs
of men and animals and led to the formation of an industrial-
urban civilization. From these innovations came manifold conse-
quences that were reflected in every aspect of life. Human popu-
lation expanded enormously and was increasingly concentrated
in cities. The misery of poverty gradually receded before an in-
creased flow of goods. Specialization in production and distribu-
tion created great new occupational groups, and favored the
division of labor and the necessity to rationalize the industrial
process,

The rapidity with which innovation brought further innovation
is a marvel that inspires wonder. The progression from animal-
drawn freighting wagons to airborne cargo carriers, from candles
to electricity, from horse-riding couriers to the telephone and
radio, from single plow and scythe to tractor-pulled gang plows
and combines, from an agrarian economy that had persisted
basically unchanged for over five thousand years to an industrial
technology all these have been accomplished in little more than
a century. 5

The mastering and exploitation of the physical universe through
science and instruments of technology constitute a major wondef
of the world. And the evidence leads us to believe that we are
probably on the threshold of even greater achievement, perhaps
not so dramatic as spaceships and satellites, but of far-reaching
significance in new sources of energy in new uses of material
through metallurgy in biochemistry and in the continued exten-
sion of the processes of automation.

The end results of spectacular achievements in translating our
advances in physical science to the launching platform of a
satellite have provided a focus of world interest that supersedes
even that of the release of nuclear energy. Thus the rhythmic
chanting of satellite watchers on the sands of Cape Canaveral
as they communally intone "Go! Go! Go!" should be interpreted
as the inception of a new tribal ceremony providing vicarious
participation in mechanical scientific marvels, which on ordinary

46 : The Reality and the Promise

occasions remain remote from the experience of the average
person.

The complexities of industrial processes inhibit, if they do not
prevent, their full grasp by any person or group. In fact, within
modern industry, segmented specialization calls for varieties of
experts, each group of which contributes its share to the total
process. The commonalties which unite such diverse technologies
as those connected with bridge building, sugar refining, textile
manufacturing, or printing are found in the principles enunciated
by physics and chemistry. But the social congruencies remain
practically terra incognita.

The need for new forms of human organization to plan, direct.,
and coordinate was met by the proliferation of voluntary asso-
ciations, by corporate and political bureaucracy. Other types
of human groupings and activities either became peripheral or
were lost or transformed. The autonomy of local community > rep-
resented by rural neighborhood, village, or town, became attenu-
ated, as urban-centered financial, cultural, industrial, and political
hegemonies extended their areas of control and limited the
capacity for local initiation. The absolutes of history and religion
crumbled before the new secularism and man's demonstration to
himself that he could make and remake the world.

Transformation on such a grand scale is what our forebears
learned to call progress. Within the burgeoning cities the bustle,
clatter, and smoke were signs to them that the world was moving
in the right direction. The interposed surcease of a Sunday gave
emphasis to the purposefulness of weekday activity. Work be-
came an end in itself. But change of such magnitude inevitably
carries a measure of cost. Though the infrequent but regularly re-
curring depressions and panics may be viewed as temporary halts
in the expansion, individual capacity to deal with such periods of
stress has diminished with succeeding decades as increasing pro-
portions of the population lost direct control over economic well-
being through their incorporation into large-scale industrial or-
ganization. The popular saying, "Root, hog, or die," and the
accepted belief that there are no problems that hard work can-
not overcome, might fit an agrarian population that in hard times

America: The Promised Land . 47

could tighten its belt and extend its self -providing efforts, but has
little meaning to an urban worker whose connection with the soil
has been severed.

The various remedies which have been devised were not in-
tended to restore the conditions which permit individual or com-
munity self-sufficiency and autonomy. Quite to the contrary,
they give emphasis to the dependence of the person upon the
operation of the larger structure. Unemployment compensation,
subsidized housing, food stamp plans, public welfare, and agri-
cultural stabilization are examples of the myriad devices, each
with its associated administering agencies, through which a wel-
fare state overcomes some of the hazards of living in an urban-
industrial society. Financial, commercial, and industrial groups
utilize other devices mostly regulations and subsidies to set
more stable conditions under which they can operate.

The requirements of industrialism have led to the proliferation
of corporate structures economic, political, educational, etc.
of varying sizes and complexities. Another way of saying this is
that the present complex of social structures has arisen to meet
the needs of a society containing new combinations of demo-
graphic, economic, and social forces. Yet the complexities of
technological processes and of social groupings prevent a compre-
hension of the whole by the majority of that society. There is
perhaps some parallel to this in the position of the agrarian
husbandman whose superstitions, benign or otherwise, grew from
his efforts to adjust to and accept the mysterious vagaries of
such natural forces as drought, flood, wind, or insect infestation.
At least his system prescribed supplication and sacrifice to the
supernatural powers which controlled such visitations. Bureau-
cratic caprices must be endured without rituals of recompense
and atonement.

THE SCIENTIFIC VEBSUS THE AGKARIAN

We have said that we are now in a stage of development which
is so new that we have not yet perfected the concepts neces-
sary to understand it, If we single out technology as the focus for

48 : The Reality and the Promise

examining the distinction between the industrial-mechanical
phase of culture and the present, we are struck by the immense
amounts now being spent on scientific research. 6 Just a half
century ago only a handful of physicists and scientists had estab-
lished precarious footholds in government and industry. Today
they number in the thousands. Whereas once industry depended
upon the independent inventor, typified by Edison, Ford, and
Bell, for its innovations, today astrophysics, nuclear physics,
and electronics exemplify but a few of the fields which have been
incorporated into the technological revolution. This newer revolu-
tion has been under way for only a couple of decades, having
made its appearance with the utilization of pure and applied
science in industrial problems. The word automation has been
coined to express the process which joins mechanics and science
just one example of a new concept emerging to describe the
new social reality.

Scientific research, however, has penetrated far beyond the
purely physical. New horizons of understanding in social, cultural,
and psychic behavior are being opened by those who are prob-
ing perception, values, linguistics, and interaction. 7 Organiza-
tional dynamics have become a concern of those who work in the
new field of management. Never before have a culture and its
population been so willing to subject themselves to scientific
methods as participants in a consciously revealing self-examina-
tion of their habits, thoughts, and behavior.

Science, its philosophy and method, has rocketed from its
almost exclusive habitat in the laboratories and classrooms of
academia into the public arena of government, business, and
private lives. Although in the past we have had fanciful tales by
Jules Verne, popular treatment of science such as that of evolu-
tionary theory by H. G. Wells in The Outline of History, 8 and a
novel of scientific morality by Sinclair Lewis in Arrowsmith
still the power of science to alter lives, to actually control life
and death on this planet, has only recently been borne in upon
the consciousness of mankind. Science, the once pedestrian ex-
plorer of the universe, suddenly finds itself in the uncertain role

America: The Promised Land : 49

o savior and destroyer. And if only the exceptionally educated
actually read the works of Darwin, Huxley, J. B, S. Haldane,
Whitehead, Tylor, and Einstein, through popular magazines,
newspapers, and paper backs millions receive at least a cursory
introduction to the results of scientific exploration of the universe.

What has happened to the spirit of the great adventure in this
transformation? Once upon a time the frontier was a tangible
reality. There, each man according to his ability, determination,
and luck could meet the hazards of adversity and hardship,
could prove a homestead in the new West, and in the process
could help to build the nation; or the adventure was contained
within the competitive struggle of commerce and industry; or it
was found in the search for God or for knowledge. Does the
world today offer the same kind of challenge that was once open
to the explorers, inventors, entrepreneurs, frontiersmen, and
organizers of our past? What captures the imagination of con-
temporary man and gives him purpose to struggle and build, not
alone for personal gain, but also because of deeply held ideals?

Perhaps, in retrospect, our adventure will be seen to have been
the greatest. The conquest of space may symbolize, in ways so
subtle that we do not yet understand them, the hopes of man. The
unsolved problems in the scientific disciplines which undergird
medicine, education, psychotherapy, and human organization and
in the interrelationships between physical, psychic, and social
systems are of no small significance. But although the present
epoch may contain guiding purposes, there are marked differ-
ences between the present and the past. Where once the realiza-
tion of the dream was theoretically open to all, today only a
handful of the intellectual elite are actively engaged on science's
frontiers. And when their activities are not closed to the outside
world by reasons of secrecy and national security, they are con-
ducted within the context of corporate exclusiveness or the isola-
tion of the research laboratory.

It is important, therefore, to be dear about the disturbing
difference between the frontier sense of the great adventure
and the contemporary sense which locates it in the sciences.

50 : The Reality and the Promise

Ability, determination, and luck still count., o course, but they
count in a different way, for it has become ever more difficult to
say exactly what constitutes success or failure. Power over others,
access to the company of the intelligent and talented, personal
wealth, escape from the mean and tawdry, were evidences of
success in the older scheme. And other more moderate measures
of success were open to all. A farmstead that survived drought
and depression; a family that gave a good start in life to its
children; a small business not quite so small as it had been at its
beginning; a position in the lodge or on the board of deacons
at the local church success had many forms, all of them recog-
nized by a system of values which bestowed upon each individual
a measure of glory for his efforts. The artist and poet might find
this system unresponsive to his own sense of achievement, but
that this is so testifies to the existence of a recognized system of
rating the outward signs of inner grace.

There seem no necessarily unfavorable consequences in the con-
temporary relations between the scientists and the remainder of
the population as long as training in the methods and techniques
of science remain available for those who seek careers in this
area, and as long as there is continuous interpretation of the
findings of science through the mass media.

But the scientific frontier does not reward its successful ex-
ploiters in the same way as those on the old frontier were ac-
corded recognition. On the one hand, the uninitiated are excluded
from grasping the achievements of the patient researcher or the
brilliant theorist and from participating even vicariously in the
subtle rewards which accrue. On the other hand, a genuine
contribution to science outlasts the pyramids, but the scientist's
ownership of it ceases with its publication. Within the highly
abstract symbolic world of science itself, success has a dear
meaning, one that admits no distinctions among the races, re-
ligions, sexes, or ages of man, Our social groupings outside
science, however, do and must recognize at least some of these
distinctions as important. In this period of transition, there is an
imbalance between our social ways of grouping people and

America: The Promised Land : 51

recognizing achievements on the one hand and the nature of
the scientific collectivity and its criteria for success on the other.
So long as the scientific laboratory was in no essential relation
with society, this imbalance was of no concern. When this rela-
tion comes to be a central one, specifically when the scientific
frontier becomes the primary locus of the continuation of the
American sense of frontier, then this imbalance must be given
serious attention.

The agrarian world view contrasted sharply with the rational,
scientific one since it was based upon patterns emanating from
family and community and because it was historically linked with
supernatural explanations of man's origin and destiny. Most
problems facing the individual could be met by him either as a
member of the family or through communal arrangements in
church, community, or government. The individual felt able
to cope with the vicissitudes of life by the application of his
intelligence and effort to the problems of livelihood and by co-
operation with his fellows to meet needs beyond those of the
family itself. The commonalty of a family system and its social
adjuncts, combined with a community of interest in locality and
nation, provided a universal base for rural village, open country,,
neighborhood, or plantation homogeneity. 10

Deeply imbedded in the agrarian pattern was a view of the
universe in which moral purposes, themselves extensions of family
and community standards of behavior, structured ability to per-
ceive and judge events in the external world. If all other explana-
tions failed, there was ultimate recourse to the workings of divine
will. Within this system of absolutes, of good and evil and of
moral design, each person was presumed to possess for himself
the discriminatory quality which gave purpose to the events of
life and to its wholeness. Compassion did not rest upon the denial
of standards, as contemporary relativism implies, but upon an
acceptance that wrongdoing, however much warranted by the
circumstances, must still be judged against a code of moral up-
rightness.

Although the standards by which one judged behavior were

52 : The Reality and the Promise

widely accepted, their observance was far from universal Public
drunkenness, wife-beating, physical mistreatment of children,
brutality to animals, and unnecessary violence were suffered to
exist. Legal and customary practices gave wide discretionary
powers to the male head of a family and to property owners.
Adversities manifest in poverty and depravity were more likely
to be accepted as evidences of divine retribution or individual
deficiency rather than as brutalized manifestations of social dis-
order. We count the change in practice and belief as evidence
of a more humane and enlightened civilization.

A deep sense of history, linked with the ideal of the great man,
the hero, was also contained within the agrarian world view.
It may seem surprising that a nation that from the days of its
Revolutionary War has hailed the deeds of the young and has
always associated itself with the spirit of youthfulness should
also give such emphasis to the past. (Perhaps cultural continu-
ities run deeper than suspected, and even in a new land the
basic matrix of Germanic and Celtic interpretation remains fixed,
even though we replace the demigods with men of flesh and
blood.) The list of American heroes stretches from the rebels
Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams through Washington, Jefferson,
and Franklin. We revere the frontiersmen Daniel Boone and
Davy Crockett, the good-bad men romanticized in Billy the Kid
and Jesse James, the mythical characters Hiawatha, John Henry,
and Paul Bunyan. The mechanical geniuses Eli Whitney, Thomas
Edison, and Henry Ford may be joined with our empire builders
and men of finance of uneasy fame, Astor, Hill, Morgan, Vander-
bilt, and Rockefeller. Finally, we honor the great political leaders
through Lincoln to Roosevelt. Only Lincoln, of all our heroes, is
cast in the somber colors of deep tragedy. The others are ex-
pressive of that joyous company that were part of the great
adventure, an adventure that endured the one great sacrifice of
a fratricidal war, to set the course of common purpose.

The men whom we glorify epitomize action and success, but
there also runs a deep stream of melancholy in our culture, a
stream related to our sense of history. Although Negro spirituals

America: The Promised Land 53

express this as the tragedy of a whole people, tragedy has always
been an intensely individual affair, in which inner emotional
suffering assumes characteristics of a personal, sacred world. Yet
in no sense were the experiences upon which these feelings were
based held to be secret. Rather, there was the sense of hopeless-
ness in attempting to transmit the depth of emotion. Our litera-
ture has sometimes caught the poignant loneliness which
bereavement, as one form of personal tragedy, expresses. It was
made explicit in the writings of Poe and Melville, Benet and
Wolfe. But during the period when our culture still preserved
the principle of generational continuity, it was incumbent upon
the elders to transmit their experiences to those who were to
follow. The sense of a specific tragedy might be extinguished, but
the theme was kept alive in the cultural blood stream. Some
tragedies, such as death, called for communal observance, but
those associated with romantic disillusionment or personal failure
had to be carried alone, awaiting time, the great healer.

Unlike the contemporary world, the agrarian provided ab-
solutes imbedded in history and religion. Within this framework
of conceptual certainties, both individual and group evaluated
the events of life. The universe within which man operated was
a moral one: it had purpose. And man possessed divine attributes
which gave him a sense of destiny and the responsibility and
capacities to exercise control over it. But man was also believed
to be fallible and mortal hence, the tragedies of life. Through
the adversities of fate, through failure to realize one's capacities,
even through conformance with the guideposts which led to
success as measured in wealth or position, in fact through all
aspects of living, one encountered the recurring manifestation
of man's fallibility and mortality. Herein lay the contradiction;
for although the world demanded struggle and striving, it also
denied consummation. The burden could never be laid down.
True tragedy, not just pain or frustration, was the price exacted
from all who joined the contests of life. But true tragedy is
possible only if there is a moral universe, one in which the acts

54 : The Reality and the Promise

of men have consequences, one in which commitment is concomi-
tant with accepting the purposes of a social order.

The erosion of meaning in history has been accompanied by a
corresponding decline in the understanding of the cosmic sense
of tragedy. The separation of man from intimate participation in
the great recurring drama of cyclical birth and death of nature
has blunted his sensitivity to life's processes. Celebration of the
Resurrection has become synonymous with a fashion parade.
For a world busily engaged in directing the flow of bureaucratic
memoranda or with manning its machines, the urgency of time
and task does not permit frequent or sustained interruption.
Thus the observance of death becomes a private memorial, while
death itself as a significant process of nature has been for all
practical purposes removed from the realm of human experience.
American families no longer have a functional place for the sick,
the old, and the senile. Hospitals and institutions become the
last residence of the aged. The nature of institutional lif e and of
the demands of the world inevitably separate the living from the
dying. Under such circumstances death, which should call forth
an expression from the living to unite and shoulder the responsi-
bilities passed on to them, serves only to separate and isolate.
The communal amelioration of personal tragedy has been lost. 11

CULTURAL DISTINCTIONS

Inevitably, within the shift from an agrarian to a commercial-
industrial and finally to a metropolitan-scientific civilization, there
must be changes in the ways people behave and perceive others
and in the values they hold. The basic standards of behavior,
taste, and evaluation in American agrarianism were derived from
distinctions organized around sex, age, race, and social status.
Unlike a feudal order, however, where distinctions were solidi-
fied and transmitted in hereditary castes, the American revolu-
tion promised that the individual would find opportunities to
demonstrate his capacities or, in current terms, to fulfill himself.

The ethos of scientific-metropolitan culture is one in which dis-

America: The Promised Land : 55

tinctions based upon many of the categories that once served
as a basis for differential behavior are no longer universally ap-
plicable. Discriminations based upon race and religion, labeled
prejudice and bigotry, are rapidly disappearing. Although in prac-
tice we may fall short of the ideal, the day when women can
be denied the right of participation in all phases of public life
is past. Logically, age distinctions should also diminish when
they are in conflict with ability to perform. The operation of
impersonal and equitable civil service policies must, of necessity,
recognize only upper and lower age limitations as a criterion for
employment.

No society has ever before successfully challenged the distinc-
tions based upon age and sex as the fundamental division of a
cultural system. 12 Although elimination of these distinctions is
far from complete, we have already moved a long distance upon
that road, and there is no evidence of a turning back. In gainful
employment, for example, women now constitute one-third of the
labor force and they continue to claim larger percentages of some
prestige occupations formerly reserved for males. There are, how-
ever, changes of a more subtle kind which do not lend themselves
to statistical treatment although observation substantiates their
validity. In particular there seems to be a progressive blurring
and merging of the behavior which distinguishes the two sexes.
Within the home it is not unusual, in fact it may now be cus-
tomary, for the husband to assume activities once considered
wifely. On the other hand, participation in the community and
economic world beyond the home is no longer purely a male
prerogative. In manners and morals we may observe further
diminution of the distinctions.

One might assume that the tendency toward homogeneity
would favor greater ease in the relations between the sexes.
But there seems in fact to have been a serious deterioration in
the ability of the sexes, as male and female, to communicate
with each other. 13 Superficial evidence will contradict the asser-
tion. The happily married young couples and their children,
who populate the suburbs and engage in activities together, do

56 : The Reality and the Promise

not present a picture of marital instability. However, divorce
rates, the phenomenal rise of marriage counseling a manifesta-
tion of connubial disturbances and the emphasis of much popu-
lar literature substantiate the impression of deep instabilities at
the individual and social levels. What a fantastic world that
permits air castles to supercede reality! Advertisers exhort us to
reduce the serious business of living to the level of the pleasur-
able. We should enjoy "fun" times, own "fun" cars, eat
"fun" meals, and presumably select "fun" partners for "fun" mar-
riages. But the play has a semblance of reality because it occurs
in a real house, and girls possess warm, live babies unlike the
synthetic kind whose vocabulary is limited to "Ma-Ma" and that
can wet their diapers only with tap water. Perhaps the intensified
dependence of children in the family has diminished the capacities
of some to become differentiated sexualized adults, especially if
the images of such roles are inadequate and if the elders fail to
claim their own kind. 14

In the generational pattern of the nuclear family change has
manifested itself most strikingly. In industrial society conditions
do not only permit but in fact enforce the abandonment of the
three-generation family. The American nuclear family represents,
during the period of childhood dependency, a two-generation
system, but with the marriage of the children, or their departure
for college, it becomes a one-generational type. However natural
this kind of system may appear to those who know no other,
nowhere has such a system ever before existed. What ultimate
consequences may result from this radical shift in the funda-
mental structure of family are not now discernible. It is apparent,
however, that the American type of nuclear family carries a
greater responsibility for the emotional well-being of its mem-
bers and for the induction of its young into the larger society
than any other now known. 15

Extensive modifications in the age structure of American cul-
ture are apparent in the continuously increasing length of child
dependency and in the shortened period of full adult participa-
tion. The former is a function of the large number of persons

America: Hie Promised Land - 57

who spend a greater segment of their lives in formal schooling. All
but a tiny fraction of these live at home and are dependent upon
their parents until completion of high school. The majority of
those who attend college also remain dependent upon their
families. The extension of the period of school attendance, by
custom and by law, delays the entry of the child into economic,
community, and familial adulthood. Only the most advanced of
industrial societies can afford the luxury of keeping such a large
segment of its population in economic idleness.

The enforced idleness of the aged at the other end of the
spectrum is also a purely contemporary phenomenon. Retirement
of most workers is mandatory at seventy, but this age limit is
gradually being lowered and in some occupations years of service
permit retirement at fifty or fifty-five. The pressures for further
lowering of the mandatory age will increase as our productive
capacity outruns our ability to consume, unless we change the
direction of our society.

Commercial-industrial civilization requires mobility of a quali-
tative sort that has never been known before. Wherever we look
we can see the signs of the contract-nomad in army, industry,
or profession. Agricultural labor is transported by air from the
Philippines and Japan to work in the harvests of California.
Fifteen million Americans reside permanently in trailers but
temporarily in the camps on the outskirts of towns or near con-
struction projects. Millions of office and factory workers commute
daily to their jobs. Peripatetic diplomats, experts, and business-
men scurry from one world meeting to another. Generational
continuity linked with community is ever more rare in our cul-
ture. In its place we have substituted a rootiessness which has
contributed to the aloneness of the individual. 16 Persons in transit
have no need for local history in the sense of a rich storehouse of
accumulated experience which has relevance for the present. On
the contrary, to face reality a cliche of psychotherapists means
to live in the present.

But movement is more than horizontal, it also carries one up in
the world. Within the American tradition, the station in life to

58 : The Reality and the Promise

which one could aspire had little relation to the accident of birth.
"From log cabin to White House*' became expressive of this part
of the American Dream. The millions of immigrants who popu-
lated the urban industrial centers from the Civil War onward be-
lieved the dream to be an achievable reality for themselves and
their children. Other aspects of the American creed remained
much more remote to the urban settlers, partly because they never
experienced the agrarian environment in which they flourished
and partly because they became caught up in the urban counter-
part of agrarian egalitarianism. Al Smith, in his rise from sidewalks
to governor of New York and in his stand for principles of social
justice, epitomized the new urbanism that rose to challenge the
hinterland as it expressed entrenched social position and agrarian
puritanism. Events in the intervening years depression, war,
boom have clinched the dominance of a (one hesitates to use
the adjectival modifier "triumphant") metropolitan-oriented, cor-
porate, and egalitarian society. 17

It is still possible to find manifestations of social distinction in
contemporary America. Distinctions based on those responsibili-
ties and skills which an institutionally organized and technical
society requires are to be expected, for the system explicitly
grants rewards commensurate with position within an organized
hierarchy. There is, for example, common acceptance that greater
financial recognition and privileges should be given to a president
than to a vice-president; to a foreman than to a laborer; to a
skilled worker than to one who is unskilled. We continue to
accept such distinctions as necessary and desirable, although
there may be little agreement on how much difference in rewards
the system should allow.

We recognize that some social distinctions are made without
regard to individual capacity and service to society. Rear-guard
actions are being fought by a few who, contrary to the evidence,
believe that the accidents of race, sex, or property have some
close relation to innate abilities and that distinctions based upon
such factors ought to remain relevant. Exclusion, however, is not
always a function of prejudice. Attention should also be directed

America: The Promised Land : 50)

toward those religious and ethnic minorities whose leadership
endeavors to maintain or create special distinctions by isolat-
ing their members from the larger society.

No one should protest the elimination from our ethical system
of no longer useful agrarian discriminations which were based
upon sex, race, or social class; and all should welcome the access
of a greater segment of the population to goods and facilities
which increase the sum of human health and well-being. Nor can
there be any justifiable objection to the relaxation or removal of
restrictions which inhibit individual self-expression or accom-
plishments. Whatever purposes these cultural features served in
an agrarian society, they are non-utilitarian in a scientific-metro-
politan civilization. Furthermore, the elimination of these arbitrary
restrictions on human aspiration and achievement is a sign of
genuine ethical progress. But as is true of all change, the
acceptance of individuals without regard to extraneous factors of
birth has been achieved at a cost; the individual may suffer
insecurity in the loss of a recognizable and stable rung on the
social ladder. Yet we hold that the uncertainty is balanced bjr
the right to strive and achieve, though in particular instances
we recognize that a life of blasted hopes and blighted loves may
be an excessive price.

Socially, too, there are costs in the freedom of each individual
to pursue his own conceptions of success and happiness. The
social costs which come from the disintegration of the need for
universal and societally held values may be seen everywhere
around us. When we concede to each individual that his opinion
is as valid as all others, when we affirm that only the individual
counts, or when we continuously defend the rights of the indi-
vidual and place little or no emphasis upon concomitant responsi-
bilities, we teeter on the abyss of anarchy.

Let us grant that the widest measure of individual freedom is a
desirable goal, but let us not forget that the cooperative necessities
of a society are contained within the differential distribution of
functions as they are expressed in organization. Family, school,
government, or factory are corporate groups composed of indi-

00 : The Reality and the Promise

viduals who, as they discharge their separate responsibilities,
contribute to the welfare of the whole. Within these activities
exist standards of behavior and performance that cannot be ab-
dicated to the whims of the child in the home, the student in the
classroom, or the employee in the office or factory.

If you read these sentences as a defense of authoritarianism or
conformity, you have missed the spirit and intent of the analysis.
Authoritarianism, in reality, is a reactionary retreat from the ex-
ercise of leadership; it is an attempt to secure conformance
through coercion. Although history is replete with accounts of
the inevitable failure of such attempts, times of stress always
evoke clamors for utilizing this avenue for the solution of prob-
lems. The utilization of externally imposed restraints to enforce
obedience denies both the processes of education and educability,
although it may teach fear of superior force.

Reward and punishment, to be effective, must operate within
established and accepted standards of behavior and performance.
The responsibility of parent, teacher, or employer is to make these
known. Those who advocate or practice child-centered homes or
schools, however commendable their intentions, are doing a great
disservice to their children and students if they reject the fact
that child development must take place within sets of condi-
tions that provide a framework for evaluating the world and
the child's place in it. These conditions include canons of dis-
crimination through which items and events may be judged and
evaluated. Otherwise, the learning process has been relegated
to a vacuum. The attention that has been recently given to
French novelist Fran$oise Sagan, actress Brigitte Bardot, and
other youthful claimants to fame is not because of their protest
against the values of their parental generation, but because that
generation has given them no basis on which valuing can be
achieved. Their emotional and intellectual development has failed
to progress beyond adolescent egocentrism. In contrast, the plaint
of a Camus is that since the canons of absolutism have been
proved false, where can man in his agony turn?

America: The Promised Land : 61

PKOBLEMS AND PURPOSE

It is a strange paradox that our intellectual elite should be
engaged in an almost frantic search for purpose and meaning to
life in a society which has been so successful in concentrating
human energy and stimulating imaginative enterprise for the
solution of problems, which has given us a superabundance of
physical plenty, orderliness, and opportunity for the individual.
It would seem that if we had lost our sense of destiny our society
would be in process of disintegration, a conclusion hardly sup-
ported by the external evidence. It could be argued that we are
living on the store of moral purpose which generated originally
the impulses that created what we are and have, or possibly that
the elite is in error. Neither of these explanations, however,
will dissolve the paradox nor bring us to an intellectual under-
standing of the reality. We believe that an answer is contained
in the commitments which arise from the relationships of indi-
viduals as these find expression in the private and public worlds
of nuclear family and the corporate system. Our data include
individuals themselves and their relations with others and the
social and cultural conditions within which human activity occurs.
These are the sources from which concepts of self, sex, age,
group, values, and ordering of our commitments must be derived.
It is here that evidences of strength or weakness, of erosion or
regeneration, will provide us with those clues that illuminate
the significant problems of our times.

Ever since George Herbert Mead alerted us to the significance
of the self and the processes of its formation, there has been an
increasing acceptance of the importance of this concept. 18 The
contemporary emphasis upon the individual has provided a
climate that has been favorable to analysis in this area. In par-
ticular, concern has been expressed for various pathological
manifestations of incomplete or distorted self -perception, as re-
vealed by psychoanalysis, and the general problem of individual
alienation expressed in loneliness and separation. Durkheim's
famous study of suicide turned up the same problem, which he

62 : The Reality and the Promise

labeled "anomie," the manifestation of which he attributed to the
absence or diminution of participation by the individual in
society. 19 Identification, which represents one aspect of the con-
cept of self, cannot be separated from commitment. When the
individual is uncertain in self-definition, he is also uncertain in
the kinds of loyalties which bind him to the world external to his
skin. When his experiences emphasize his separation from, or
fragmentation in participation, the consequences must be either
an imperfectly formed or skewed personality, or perhaps both.

But if personality is shaped by the environment so also is the
capacity for the spontaneous ordering of relations among men.
It has been amply proved that in man, as well as in many other
animals, cooperative participation in groups is learned behavior. 20
Since this is the case then it is also possible that under differing
conditions the capacity for cooperation will be more or less well
developed. In fact, a situation can be envisioned in which the
opportunities for such learning have been so limited that the
individual shows extreme social pathology. Perhaps those who
sense the isolation, separation, and estrangement of modern man
are witness to manifestations related to this process.

The separation of the individual from his environment does not
occur only on the psychic and social levels; it is equally pro-
nounced in man's estrangement from the material universe. The
obvious connections between food, shelter, and clothing and their
relations to the organized activities of men utilizing skills that
were common knowledge in simpler societies do not constitute a
part of the experience of modern man. In the realm of everyday
experience the individual is effectively, if not inevitably, separated
from great segments of the natural processes of the material
universe. Although the implications of such a separation have
not yet been determined, we surely know that the denial or
withdrawal of any type of experience is certain to have its reper-
cussions. Remote intellectualization is no substitute for an attitude
which seeks to understand the wonders and mysteries of life. Do
we still possess the capacity for wonder?

Where should we look to discover the source and the effects

America: The Promised Land : 63

of social learning? The quest will take us into the family, the
school, the community, and the corporate system. They are the
groups in which one learns and expresses identity, cultural
understandings, and social behavior. They provide the locale
for the experiences from which values are formed and purpose
and meaning made explicit.

However much we may regret the passing of the "good old
days," there is not the remotest chance that we can return to them
or that we may even stay the forces of change for long. The
absolutes of history and religion cannot sustain us as they once
did our forefathers. We must learn to live in the world we are in,
not because it is the best of all possible worlds, or even because
it is the only world we know, but because that is the only way
open to us which permits the restoration of our sense of destiny.
Perhaps we hardly appreciate the resources we have at hand to
help us. These reside in the methods by which the world and its
workings can be examined, understood, and eventually given
direction. The great advances in physical science have enormously
increased our understanding and control of nature and research
about man is beginning to point the way toward solution of
problems in psychical and social behavior.

The lesson the frontiersman taught us as he learned to adjust
to new physical surroundings in order to survive should be re-
membered, even though the specific conditions of today are radi-
cally different. The pioneers did more than adjust; they also
shaped the physical universe to express their values and social
purposes.

4

THE
IMMEDIATE PAST:

MIDWEST

AGRARIANISM

AND MAIN STREET

TOWNS

The coalition of northeastern commercial and nascent industrial
urbanism, and midwestern commercial agrariamsm, that eventu-
ally triumphed in the American Civil War gave to the American
nation a direction and commitment that was to endure for more
than half a century. 1

The political power necessary to maintain this dominance was
contained within the Republican party. The financial power re-
sided in a banking system that was linked to London. The cor-
porate system provided an organizational structure through
which the dynamics of materialistic progress were expressed. The
doctrine of Herbert Spencer, who espoused social evolution,
gave intellectual interpretation to beliefs of inevitable and con-
tinuous progress. And salvation through work, a doctrine of
Evangelical Protestantism, added spiritual substance and sane-

Midwest Agrarianism and Main Street Towns : 65

tions. Such a powerful confluence of forces working in relative
agreement could scarcely be stemmed as they transformed the
century-old traditions of subsistence agrarianism and brought into
being a new civilization. The vitality generated by this unique
coalition led, perhaps not inevitably but surely, to our con-
temporary form of civilization: metropolitan in external organiza-
tion, corporate in structure, segmented and specialized in activity,
empirical and pragmatic in outlook. Although it has evolved
from older urban and agrarian forms, in shape and spirit con-
temporary civilization has no cultural parallels.

Our purpose now is to examine the antecedents of the present,
to turn to that transitional period following the Civil War
when a new land of agrarianism, unique in world history,
emerged to share power in determining the course of the nation.
Calvinistic and puritan in temperament, commercial in economic
orientation but democratic in spirit, post-Civil War agrarianism
was the culmination of the great westward movement in Ameri-
can history.

Among the many interpretations of the genius of America,
none has had greater popularity than that advanced by Frederick
Jackson Turner. It was his thesis that the frontier, more than any
other factor, put its stamp upon American social and political
thought and its institutions. 2 Other interpreters of the American
scene have followed his lead. James Truslow Adams adopted the
same thesis in his book, The American* Reinhold Niebuhr also
turned to events on the frontier to explain the distinctive aspects
of the Protestant ethic and its impact in shaping the American
way. 4

There is no question but that the frontier molded, refined, and
emphasized certain aspects of the American ethic and that its
influence extended into national life. Jacksonian democracy was,
in part, an expression of equalitarianism bred by the conditions
of pioneer life. In a situation where mere survival depended upon
strength of character expressed in individual fortitude, determina-
tion, and hardihood, there should be little wonder that the con-
current values mirrored the realities. Thus, the cult of individual

66 : The Reality and the Promise

liberty and freedom, but not license, found expression in all
aspects of life. The prevailing religious belief held that each man
could and should establish a direct relationship with God and
that, moreover, it was incumbent upon him to interpret God's will
through his inner experiences or through His Word as found in
the Bible. Despite the differences between Presbyterian, Metho-
dist, Baptist, and their offshoots, differences that were of im-
mense significance to the contemporary protagonists, the
perspective of an elapsed century blunts the distinctions and high-
lights the basic uniformities of thought Similarly, in economic
and political thought and action the current belief and practice
was one of individualism and pragmatism. The dominating social
horizon was encompassed within the community: rural neigh-
borhood, crossroads hamlet, or town. Although the residents could
work in concert in the face of crisis or social necessity, the im-
pelling motivation had been built upon a system of internalized
values by which each man judged the actions of others and him-
self from a universally held perspective of individual responsi-
bility.

COMMERCIAL AGRABIANISM OF THE MIDWEST

During the nineteenth century, American agrarian civilization
rose to new peaks of influence and development as it expanded
into and appropriated the lands west of the Appalachians, But
it was in the half century following the Civil War that the great
heartland of America, the Mississippi Valley, sought to dominate
the political and moral life of the nation. It was here that the
microcosm of commercial small towns or villages and of the
dispersed farmsteads of the surrounding countryside became
the prevailing cultural form in the territory which stretched from
the Appalachians to the Great Plains and from the northern boreal
forests to the delta. It was in this setting that the type of civiliza-
tion which we denote "Main Street" grew and flourished.

Just as the middle colonies had produced the first American
from their amalgam of settlers from diverse European origins

Midwest Agrarianism and Main Street Towns ; 67

in the eighteenth century, in the Midwest of the following
century a new American evolved from a fresh fusion of settlers
possessing varied backgrounds but joined in their common belief
in the Promised Land. From the southern Piedmont and border
states came those who carried a deep tradition of equalitarianism,
political independence, and personal liberty. The Presbyterians
were at home in both town and country. The New Englanders
brought the spirit of commercialism., a preference for town life,
and a reverence of things intellectual which they preserved in
their beloved Congregational church with its educated ministry.
From the Middle Atlantic states came those bearing all the
characteristics contained within a tradition of an interdependent
town and country. And from northern Europe came a stream of
hardy peasants, whose disposition and aspirations favored their
rapid assimilation. Whatever the cultural origin, the pattern of
town and country predominated and proved to be a more com-
plex and differentiated social system than that which had pre-
viously existed in agrarian life.

Midwestern vitality can be attributed to a number of factors.
The diversity of its population, the fertility of its soil, oppor-
tunities for expansion, the new agricultural technology, the rapid
spread of a railroad network after 1865, and the rise of railroad
and river cities like Chicago, St. Louis, and Omaha all consti-
tuted contributing influences. But the growth of railroads and
cities was as much a response to the settling of the land as it was
a stimulant to further growth. If Chicago became the hog-butcher
of the world, it was because the new commercialism motivated
farmers to produce for the market rather than retain the age-
old pattern of self-sufficiency which their ancestors had brought
to the shores of the New World. Midwestern agrarianism became
dominant because it had joined, rather than contested, the philos-
ophy of the market place. It was a union for which it was to pay
dearly in later years, however, for the alliance which gave it
vitality in the beginning, also assured its transformation and
eventual demise. 5

But other factors also contributed to the emergent midwestera

68 : The Reality and the Promise

preeminence. The constrictions of rigid strata found in the older
plantations of the South, the communal conservatism of the New
England village, and the social segmentation of coastal cities
were practically nonexistent. Although in reality social distinc-
tions did exist within and between town and country, there was
also the prevalent belief that America had no social classes and
that each man could alter the circumstances of his life and build
as he chose. There was not only the belief but at the same time
the reality that each man according to his ingenuity, his virtues,
and his individual effort could acquire for himself the symbols of
success: land, wealth, and the esteem of his fellow men.

We might also consider the absence of a seriously competing
system of agrarian values. The Civil War and the Reconstruction
had dealt the plantation system of the South a mortal blow. The
southern small farmers were increasingly depressed by soil ex-
haustion and a system of land tenure which gave each succeed-
ing generation a smaller portion to farm, as the land was divided
among the inheriting children. The thin soils of New England
and upper New York State were already in process of abandon-
ment by 1845, a process that was to continue as the promise of
the West or of the mill towns of the Northeast drained off
young and old. Moreover, the competition of cheaply produced
and transported meat and grain from the new West doomed
the marginal farmer, irrespective of his location.

Only on the high plains of the open grassland of the West
did a competing agrarianism of equal vitality appear. There, for
a few decades, the descendants of cattle-herding Scotch-Irish,
who had swept westward ahead of settlements on the southern
frontier, founded the colorful cattle empires which have con-
tributed so much to the saga of the American West and to con-
temporary TV audiences. This open, violent, and relatively simple
culture, which centered in the ranch headquarters with its boss-
cowhand social distinctions, has all but disappeared with the
coming of barbed wire, scientific and mechanical wheat and
sorghum farming, and the latter-day descendants of homesteader
and nester.

Midwest Agrarianism and Main Street Towns : 69

The image we preserve and cherish as exemplifying American
agrarianism is not that of the New England village, the southern
plantation, the Appalachian hill farmer, the western cattle spread,
or the factory in the fields which was to appear later in Cali-
fornia. It is the image of farm homesteads and Main Street which
claimed America's heartland*

But for nineteenth century Americans it was more than an
image, it was also a promise and a symbol. Individually and by
groups settlers penetrated the thickly forested lands of the old
Northwest Territory, felling the trees, erecting cabins, cultivating
the land, and fighting Indians when necessary. Crossroad hamlets
and later villages and towns appeared in the wake of this west-
ward movement. By 1845 they had burst beyond the Mississippi
on to the prairies of Iowa and Missouri. The world was witness
to one of the greatest migrations in its history, one that de-
manded unusual qualities of physical and moral strength for
survival. Of that migration Henry Nash Smith was moved to
write:

. . . and the Great Interior Valley was transformed into a
garden: for the imagination, the Garden of the World. . . .
The master symbol of the garden embraced a cluster of
metaphors expressing fecundity, growth, increase, and bliss-
ful labor in the earth, all centering about the heroic figure
of the idealized frontier farmer armed with that supreme
agrarian weapon, the sacred plow. 6

What was there in the beliefs and practices of individuals and
groups to which we may turn for an explanation of the fortitude
with which settlers bore hardship ,and adversity? What were the
inner strengths which supported those who experienced grueling
toil, privation, and monotony? What were their hopes and aspira-
tions? And how in their system of social arrangements of family,
church, school, and government were their values derived and
expressed?

Most people had a deep commitment to America and a belief
in its destiny as the Promised Land. The child learned his history

70 r The Reality and the Promise

either from those who had taken part in the stirring events of the
past or from the remembrances of parents or grandparents who
had it directly from those now dead. National history was also
family history, for one's ancestors had fought against British
tyranny, migrated westward in the face of hostile Indian and
physical hardship, taught Johnny Reb a lesson, and preserved the
Union. Decoration Day, with the inevitable parade of the Boys in
Blue, the graveside ceremonies, and the recitation of Lincoln's
Gettysburg Address, called forth the memories and rededicated
the living. The Fourth of July, with its family picnics, patriotic
oratory, and the inevitable contests of skill and strength, re-
affirmed the cohesion based on unity of purpose and experience.
But even though there were also bitter religious and partisan dif-
ferences that separated the community into factions, life seemed
to contain a grand design whereby each one in advancing him-
self contributed to the whole.

The destiny of God's plan was to be fulfilled through man's own
efforts, and the evidences of progress toward Utopia were every-
where apparent. The settling of the land, the conversion of
prairie or forest into plowed fields, the growth of towns, the ex-
tension and spread of the railroads, the new farm machinery, and
other changes were manifestations of never ending progress that
would ease the human burden and bring peace and prosperity
to all. But in the meantime there was work to do and each man
must carry his burden alone. Hamlin Garland extolled these
people thus:

. The men and women of that far time loom large in my
thinking for they possessed not only the spirit of adventurers
but the courage of warriors. Aside from the natural distor-
tion of a boy's imagination, I am quite sure that the pioneers
of 1860 still retained something broad and fine in their
action, something a boy might honorably imitate. 7

The virtues of life were many. They included hard work,
sobriety, prudence, thrift, prudery, and the care of one's family.
They summed up the qualities that were likely to ensure survival

Midwest Agrarianism and Main Street Towns j 71

in the straggle to meet the exacting demand of frontier life. But
there was another side to this idealized piety. The exuberant
roistering of Saturday night drinking, fighting, and whoring en-
ticed hired hands and rural youth; there was brutality and sad-
ism; and the sporting element gave glamour to the primrose
path. 8 The church folk, led by the thundering condemnations of
their ministers, avoided these pitfalls of the devil. They preached
that the patrimony of family or nation must not be wasted
through idleness or sensual excess. Prudence, sobriety, thrift,
and hard work were the ways of God.

But the onward path of progress was not always an even one*
There were bad times when prices were low, when crops failed
from drought, flood, or insect pest, when the railroad monopoly
and commodity speculators gouged the husbandmen. There was
corruption in government, the selfish greed of Wall Street, the
sin of the cities. These were the threats to the realization of the
promise. In characteristic fashion fanners turned to self-protec-
tive associations like the Granges and the Farmers' Alliances;
they sought relief through political action in the Populist move-
ment, in the campaign for free silver, and in the Non-Partisan
League; or they joined in temperance movements. The issues
which called forth these efforts divided neighbors and kinsmen,
but irrespective of their differences, all remained firm in their
belief that it was man's destiny to find a solution. Day-to-day
experience gave testimony to the belief that no problem was so
difficult that it could not be solved through hard work. How else
had the country grown to be so great and prosperous?

These were some of the conditions and this was the spirit of
the times in which commercial agrarianism flourished. Their sum-
marization provides the setting within which family and neigh-
borhood is made more meaningful.

FARM AND FAMILY

The pattern of isolated farm homesteads, which comprised a
cluster of buildings providing shelter for man and beast, was

72 : The Reality and the Promise

almost universal. Except for the meanest habitations, each house
was divided into rooms which corresponded with specialized
activities. Upstairs were the sleeping quarters. On the first floor
were the parlor, kitchen, and perhaps another bedroom or storage
annex. The parlor was reserved for the periodic visit of the minis-
ter to Sunday dinner, for family festivals, funerals, or other special
occasions. It was in the kitchen, however, that family life really
centered. Here the food was prepared and eaten; the day's events
discussed and the next day's planned. Here children studied,
games were played, and neighbors visited. In the winter months
sick children and even animals shared the warmth of its big iron
cookstove under the watchful and ministering eyes and hands of
the woman of the house. The house was her domain and in its
confines she brought to her family the never ending care and
comfort which were deemed her duty.

The outdoors of barnyard and field, animal and crop, belonged
to the man. Assisted by his sons and hired man, and on oc-
casions by help obtained from neighboring farms, he plowed,
planted, and harvested; fed and cared for his cattle, horses, and
pigs; milked the cows; repaired and built; and performed the
myriad tasks which custom prescribed and necessity demanded
of the adult male who was husband and father. It was his task to
provide and protect; the exigencies of life left little time for en-
joyment of its pleasures and little room for softness in his manner
if the whole were to survive and, if possible, prosper. It was each
family's goal to be completely self-sufficient in foodstuffs and
nearly so in the other requirements of life. Except for those
occasions when harvesting or some other activity demanded co-
operative endeavor, each man made do with what he had in his
own and his family's labor. One did not interfere in his neighbor's
business nor his practices, although occasional crisis would break
this do-for-yourself austerity with the call to nurse a sick neigh-
bor, to assist in. childbirth, to lay out the dead, or to help those
whose stress threatened survival.

The organization and beliefs of the times called for each man
to stand on his own and thus to preserve the equality among men.

Midwest Agrarianism and Main Street Towns : 73

And on the shoulders of the male fell the heaviest responsibility.
In neighborhood matters it was his voice which counseled with
his peers on problems of taxes, schools, roads, religion, and
politics or even concerning violations of the moral and legal
code. On him fell the obligation to meet taxes and payments in
interest and debt, to sell the harvest, and to buy supplies and
machinery. Although the decisions might be shared with the wife,
it was not the practice to do so.

The steady grind which those of the Middle Border demanded
of themselves did not come from a tradition of endemic poverty.
To be hungry was practically unknown, and other essentials of
life requiring cash outlays could be kept to a minimum. There
were those who lost their land through tax sale or foreclosure,
but they had had little to start with and could start again. Bad
times or poor management had been their downfall. The next
attempt, it was believed, would bring success.

The outward symbols of success were expressed in new or en-
larged houses, furnishings, new barns, farm machinery, purebred
stock, and always more land. When good prices, hard work, and
bountiful yields had cleared the land of debt, it was time to buy
more land. Each man extended his holdings as he could, and with
better machinery, hired hands, and the labor of his family he
sought to produce more and acquire wealth. Farms grew larger.
The successful bought out those who had failed or moved on.
And even the best were not immune to "western fever," or the
urge to seek the Promised Land.

Many documents provide us with descriptions of the life in
those times, and one such informative account is found in Grand-
mother Browns Hundred Years, 1827-1927.* She reports that only
in matters concerning the education of her sons and of money did
she ever disagree with her husband, and as she concludes, her
differences of opinion were without effect All other decisions of
their life together were made by her husband, and she accepted
these without question. The Ohio farm to which he first carried
her as a bride, their new home in Iowa, their move to town, busi-
ness enterprises were all matters which remained within his realm

U : The Reality and the Promise

of male decision. Other accounts of frontier life confirm the
patient, if not always willing, acquiescence of the woman in her
husband's plans. Nor did children have any share in family de-
cisions. They could express their wishes, but their duty was to
obey the directions which their father set for them, whether these
involved farm work or education. Only as they came of age were
their rights respected although not necessarily approved. Hamlin
Garland may have phrased the relationship for aU when he spoke
of his father as follows:

I think he loved his children, and yet I never heard him
speak an affectionate word to them. He was kind, he was
just, but he was not tender. 10

Those who had experienced midwest life and later came to
portray it in fiction and description are not in full agreement on
all details of farm life but the generalities are clear. Garland felt
his mother followed a "daily routine of lonely and monotonous
housework." 11 Grandmother Brown echoed the same sentiment
when she said,

I look back to those years on the farm as the hardest years
of my life. But there are, of course, some happy memories of
the life there. Always when there are growing things plants
and children there is the beauty. Though I had not much
companionship with the people of the neighborhood, we
had visitors from time to time from Ohio. 12

There was sweet with the bitter; when tragedy struck, as it
sometimes did with the death of a child, or when the pains of
childbirth were endured with only the help of a neighbor woman,
there was always the comforting belief that one must endure and
go on. That was God's way and although His will brought heart-
ache and pain, it was the destiny of man to bear these crosses
without complaint. For the work of the world must be done. 13

And there was sweet without the bitter in the occasional gather-
ings of family and friends. Christmas and Thanksgiving were
family holidays filled with special preparation for the great meal,
with conversation, with songs and games. There were the sum-

Midwest Agrarianism and Main Street Towns a 75

mer picnics, the journey to town for the July Fourth celebration,
the circus, or the county fair. These were occasions when the
family traveled in backboard or spring wagon, and later in
carriage or buggy, dressed in their Sunday best and carrying
bulging picnic baskets. Attendance at the neighborhood church
during the summer and winter revivals gave excitement to the
young and a chance for courting to the young adults. Always,
however, there was the return to the evening chores and the
workaday world.

Although social custom inhibited the display of affection be-
tween a man and his wife and children, and the nature of his
responsibility reinforced the reserve which existed between a
father and his children, the nature of the mother's role was quite
different. She cared for her children when they were young and
helpless, nursed them when sick, fed them when hungry, made
and mended their clothes, and instilled in them a moral code of
right behavior and belief in God. Until her sons became old
enough to seek out the man's world of work and companionship,
she was not barred from showing them affection. Afterward, they
shrugged off such gestures with embarrassment. But the tie be-
tween mother and son, outwardly distant, seems to have been a
powerful one if we accept the words and actions of those who
have described their lives for tis. In part motivated by the search
for maternal approbation, nevertheless a deeper vein of feeKng
seems to have been a desire to release their mothers from the
wearing toil of daily life. Hamlin Garland struggled to earn
enough that he might free his mother of her burdens, and eventu-
ally he and his brother succeeded in bringing her back from her
husband's Dakota farm to a cottage in a Wisconsin village where
Garland had been born. But this did not fully sooth his anguish,
for part of the price which commercial agrarianism demanded
of its members was rootlessness and loneliness. 14

The impact of women on the transformation of American so-
ciety constitutes a chapter in American history that has never
been fully explored. That part which is best known began with
the great democratizing trend of the 1830'$ and led to the move-

76 : The Reality and the Promise

ment for the emancipation of women and the ensuing crusades
for suffrage and temperance. Women fought for and won their
rights, and in the process curtailed and reformed some preroga-
tives associated with the male world. James Truslow Adams be-
lieves that the growth of towns and the spirit of commercialism
provided the entering wedge for the destruction of common en-
terprise between the sexes. The males being fully occupied with
the accumulation of wealth freed their wives from household
drudgery and gave them leisure, which the women devoted to
cultural and community pursuits. 15 The divergent interests even-
tuated in a clash not yet resolved. The South, however, ex-
perienced no such movement, for a form of family prevailed
there in which women were already romantically and realistically
the center of the social system. 10

The unpublicized though far more powerful and subtle in-
fluence arose from the woman's position in the family within the
unique doctrinal climate of midwestern life. Anything which con-
tributed to suffering was condemned, but suffering in women was
particularly abhorrent In other times and places women have
been forced to endure hardship, but the prevailing life view for
such cultures failed to evoke the compassion which the pioneer
children, particularly the sons, held for their mothers. Some
decades ago, when the urge to memorialize the pioneer tradition
swept many midwestern communities, the symbol through which
they chose to eternalize their sentiment was a heroic statue
named, "The Pioneer Woman." This statue still stands where it
was erected, alongside Civil War cannon or memorial shaft to
the war dead, on courthouse lawns or in public squares. With
rifle firmly grasped in one hand, babe clutched to breast with the
other, and with a small child holding onto the folds of her
skirt, this figure is shown in the posture of bravely pushing
onward. No monument, however, could discharge the deep guilt
felt by those sons who knew the privation, hardship, and cultural
poverty which their mothers endured. Within the documents
describing life on the Middle Border, we find this theme recur-
ring time and again. The guilt was compounded when the sons

Midwest Agrarianism and Main Street Towns : 77

departed to seek their fortunes, for they felt that they had
abandoned their own. 17

Rural schools were a responsibility and extension of the farm
families in each locality. A locally elected board set the tax rate,
hired the teacher, and built and maintained a building. Often
the teacher was the daughter of some local farmer and lived at
home, but if she was from another area, she "boarded round/'
Her background, values, and experience were akin to the families
of the children she taught. School terms were adjusted to the
needs for additional labor in periods of peak farm activity. The
school house was also the natural setting for various communal
gatherings. In all such details the peripheral position of educa-
tion is demonstrated. There was little direct, observable contribu-
tion of the school to the immediate realities of farm life. 18

The system was one which forced the continuous dispersal of
most of the children as they came to adulthood. Sons of less
affluent farmers hired themselves out as hands or moved to the
towns in the search of uncertain employment. Others were ap-
prenticed by their fathers to skilled artisans or given minimum
assistance to continue their education for teaching or business
skills. Still others started life on rented land or followed the pat-
tern of their fathers a generation earlier in a push to unclaimed
lands of the West. A few of the wealthier farmers could and did
send their children to denominational or state colleges. But what-
ever course was followed, assistance from home was minimal, and
where money was involved it was as likely to be a loan to be re-
paid as to be a gift or payment for work done on the land. The
abrupt ending of family dependence when one reached man-
hood was expected. Within the climate of contemporary belief,
the minimum assistance given to each child found sanction in the
code that each must prove himself and that character and forti-
tude would lead to success.

Partings, however, were not without their stresses. Grand-
mother Brown recalls the deep heartache when her youngest left,
although the event was forty years behind her. 19 Often the de-
partures left bitterness behind them. The youth who ran away

78 : The Reality and the Promise

to seek adventure or to escape harsh parental tyranny was a
common type. But it seems to have been the custom to recognize
the right of children to leave when they reached their legal adult-
hood. There are stories of young men who appeared with bag
packed on the morning of their twenty-first birthday, pausing
only to bid farewell to their mothers before starting down the
road toward town. Hamlin Garland's version of his own departure
reveals to us the uncertainty, loneliness, and homesickness of the
youth who has gone into the world. And, of course, as each in his
turn did leave, it was to establish anew the process of family
origin, growth, and dispersal. 20

These were some of the affective aspects in the relations be-
tween parents and children. But there also existed a strong sense
of equalitarian justice demanding that each child be treated
exactly alike, a principle that was usually rigidly adhered to in
the case of property and was reflected in the system of inheri-
tance and land tenure.

The tenure system in the Midwest was in marked contrast to
the practices found among many peasant peoples and in the
American agrarian South, where it was the custom to divide the
land equally among the residual heirs, a practice which after
several generations of settlement led to a congested population
of small holdings. In the Midwest the farm was transferred intact
to the new occupier, who might or might not be a child of the
previous owner. Each sibling, however, shared equally in the
estate of his parents. If the land passed to a son, it was his re-
sponsibility to reimburse his brothers and sisters for their fair
share of the value of the home place if the parents were deceased,
or to pay his parents, who had presumably retired to some nearby
village, for the full value of the property which they had re-
linquished. In the event of the latter procedure, brothers and
sisters would not receive their portion until the death of the
parents.

The independent family system of midwestern agrarianism was
based upon a morality embodied in Evangelical Protestantism.
The system also embraced the spirit of the market, encouraged

Midwest Agrarianism and Main Street Towns : 79

change, was symbolized by the concept of progress, and was
antithetical to traditionalism. The family demanded of its mem-
bers a high order of individual responsibility. Achievement could
be measured in the material realities of increased land holdings,
greater production, and accumulated wealth, which although per-
mitting ease, did not have this consequence as its goal. Its mo-
bility rejected the necessity of correlating family stability with
community continuity. There was a gradual but continuous re-
placement of farm families in each neighborhood. The movement
led to the loss of friends and to the scattering of relatives. 21 But
the nature of the relationships within the family was the most
powerful factor in its own dispersal. Eventually, of course, the
rationalization of agriculture through mechanization and scientific
farming brought a decline to the system based upon the family
farm and to the Protestant ethic associated with it The system
was one which carried the seeds of its own modification and
eventual decline, a decline that was hastened by the growth of
a competing social order that was urban based and industrially
organized. In fact, the internal logic operating in the agrarian
system prepared its members for eventual absorption into the new
and powerful rationale.

These, then, were the generalizations. The agrarianism of
Heartland, America, had aligned itself with the spirit of com-
mercialism. Growth and change were evidence of a progress that
promised an earthly Utopia for those who were willing to labor in
the Promised Land. From each man's hand, and literally through
the use of his hands, those who labored reaped the rewards
which were intended for those who practiced the virtues and be-
lieved in the eternal verities. But the contradictions between the
philosophical and the practical aspects were hardly perceived.
The commitments to the absolutes of Evangelical Protestantism
on the one hand and to a world in continuous flux in its march
toward Utopia on the other were hardly compatible. Thus Gar-
land, who had partially escaped the myths of his era, could praise
Robert Ingersoll for his attacks on outworn tradition and empty
creeds. 22 There were others, like Ed Howe, Sinclair Lewis, Edgar

80 : The Reality and the Promise

Lee Masters, and Sherwood Anderson, who lifted the mask to
reveal some of the unpleasant realities which had been ob-
scured in the romanticism of an earlier era. 23

TOWN AND COUNTRY

Both town and country were interlocking variants within a dis-
tinctive cultural form, and each was dependent on the other. 24
Farmers and merchants together prospered or suffered in the
economic cycles of good and bad times. Lawyers and doctors
provided services to town and country clients alike. Farmers who
desired education beyond the primary level for their children,
turned to the schools in town. And on those high days of com-
memoration or frolicking, townsman and countryman assembled
together at circus, county fair, or patriotic observance to enjoy
sights and sounds.

Although mutual needs tied each to the other, there were per-
sistent tensions between the two. The realistic fear on the part of
the farmer that he paid too much for what he bought and re-
ceived too little for what he sold was continuously present.
Townsmen were not always directly blamed for these grievances,
since the commodity speculators, the Wall Street bankers, and
the rich industrialists were viewed as primary sources of evil.
But the townsman, in his roles of middleman in economic matters
and of mediator in cultural or political affairs, was sometimes sus-
pect in his behavior and allegiances. The frontal assault on town
monopoly took the form of farmer-organized marketing associ-
ations and retail cooperatives. In these ventures, farmers es-
tablished economic beachheads through which they hoped to
retain the profits they believed rightfully theirs. Contests on the
economic and political fronts were for positions of power in
which the two might or might not find themselves in agreement
against the "interests."

Other more subtle but equally powerful differences also sepa-
rated and bound the two. These found expression in the style
of life: mannerisms of speech and gesture, detail in costume,

Midwest Agrarianism and Main Street Towns : 81

habits of thinking and reading, all those items which distinguish
the cultivated from the rustic. It mattered little that small town
elegance could be a matter of mirth in the regional city; in the
eyes of the rural rustic the town represented a way of life that
was to be both envied and condemned.

The transformation to town ways was hastened by many fac-
tors, but the school and friendships formed there were powerful
influences. John Ise reported of his brothers and sisters,

Away from home, at college and in their teaching, the
children learned to dress and deport themselves like town
folk; and when they came home, some of them were ad-
mitted to select social cliques in town social circles that had
once seemed almost as far away and as unattainable as the
European orders of nobility. 25

The town in its complexity was more than livery stable, general
store, and bank, more than the source for professional services
and advanced education; it was also an arbiter of prestige and
of values through which the things and activities of the world
were judged. In this role it reflected its own ties to an outside
world, that of the urban East Although townsman and country-
man might join in condemnation of the wicked, corrupt, money-
mad, effete inhabitant of the cities, they were of necessity
recipients of that "higher culture" which seeped into the hinter-
land through literary magazine, fashion plate, or Chautauqua
circuit. 26

When American agrarianists broke from the centuries' old
pattern of simple subsistence to produce for the market, they un-
wittingly yielded their yeoman status for one in which social
status and advancement were significant elements. The mere
accumulation of wealth, however, was not a sufficient earthly
reward for engaging in this struggle. Farmers sought approbation
from their peers, respect from the townsman, and a better start
in life for one's children than had been their lot. Financial worth
and respect were not absolutely linked but failure was equated
with poverty. Hence the unending scramble for more. Values of

*& : The Reality and the Promise

town and countryside found rough congruence in this regard,
but in the town social class distinctions reflected factors other
than the purely economic. Agrarian equalitarianism might scoff
at the values which supported these differences but ultimately
the ambitious were forced to acknowledge them. Social advance-
ment required the acquisition of urban refinements and the
abandonment of rustic crudities. This might prove difficult for
the farmer set in his ways, but his children under proper cir-
cumstances could make the transition. These conditions were met
in the school and in the system of formal apprenticeship.

The town provided an environment much more favorable to
education. The concentration of population, greater wealth, more
varied cultural interests, aspirations of a middle class for their
children, decrease in the economic importance of children, and
other factors contributed to a more developed program. Educa-
tionally ambitious farm children were offered the opportunity for
further schooling, and in turn became exposed to the more
genteel manners of town lif e. Schools provided a setting in which
social class differences were reflected and perpetuated.

For the many, high school was beyond the range of either
aspirations or financial capability, For them the completion of
the grades in a one-room country school gave one more formal
schooling than Abe Lincoln had had. They could shed their
country ways by imitating others, and the lure of the town was
great. The bells that called Dick Whittington to London Town
rang figuratively for many an American farm youth.

SOCIAL CLASS AND THE TOWN-COMMUNITY

The town pattern was a basically simple one, however much
more complex it might be than the earlier New England village,
the southern plantation county-town system, or the dispersed
open-country settlement. The territorial unity included a central
town and its rural hinterland. Between these two existed a
symbiotic relationship which found immediate expression at the
economic level in the division of labor for production and dis-

Midwest Agrarianism and Main Street Towns : 83

tribution of goods but which extended to and included other
aspects of social grouping and cultural behavior. The social
differences within the framework of educational, religious, po-
litical, economic, and associational institutions and activities
formed the basis for social class disoiminations. 27 Even those
cities whose growth was stimulated by industrialization retained
in those sections inhabited by old- Americans much of the flavor
of town life. But the flood of European immigrants who jammed
themselves into ethnic ghettos within the larger cities, or flocked
to settle the mill and mining towns, within the zones of im-
migrant settlement preserved at first the cultural system which
they brought with them. Their children were to find themselves
in the main stream of American cultural evolution, not because
they or their parents had become assimilated to town life, but
because metropolitanism had triumphed as the prevailing cul-
tural type.

The internal organizational structure of the town-community
was such that no one institution, either of church, economic enter-
prise, or government, could exercise an autocratic control over
other aspects of life. Instead, the institutional arrangements, ir-
respective of how interwoven and interdependent their activities
might be, retained a theoretical freedom of action and initiative.
It was through this type of system, in which controls were locally
held, that the towns could maintain their semi-autonomy. 28 Later
on, the intrusion of remotely owned and controlled retail store
or industrial enterprise eroded the capacity of the town to meet
its own problems. This effect is detailed in a subsequent chapter.

It is a curious anomaly that the prevailing beliefs of this
period denied the existence of social classes although social dif-
ferences were clearly perceived and accepted. The popular be-
lief in a classless society can be partially explained because the
system, as a whole, the community in which social differentiation
was a characteristic, worked so well. In the workaday world, the
activities of commerce, politics, religion, recreation, and house-
hold duties brought diverse persons together in habituated rela-
tionships in which the situation, and not an abstraction of social

84 : The Reality and the Promise

class, determined the part each should play. These daily face-to-
face relationships were given symbolic confirmation in the an-
nually repetitive observances of Independence Day, Decoration
Day, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas, elections, graduations, athletic
events, county fairs, and religious revivals. In each type of event
both differences and similarities were expressed. The differences
were those of age, sex, status, and prestige: the commonalty was
that of locality and adherence to similar values and symbols.

These seasonal occurrences provided the opportunity for each
individual to comprehend the system as a whole and, on oc-
casion, to participate with others as an equal. From participation
one learned and reinforced the behavior that was expected of
him and others. In this sense the community of group and activity
was a reciprocal expression of the cultural differences which we
label social class.

The differential allocation of prestige to types of activities,
characteristics, and behavior provided a vast and inclusive back-
ground of distinctions against which it was possible to evaluate
each person's place within the whole. Furthermore, there was a
basic agreement between one's participation in the institutional
structure and the possession of characteristics which placed one
high or low in the scale of prestige reckoning. For example, those
persons whose activities required special skills, as in the practice
of medicine or law, or those who were associated with the con-
trol of economic life, as the bankers and merchants, or those who
gave expression to community values in religion or politics were
accorded and occupied positions of prominence in both daily and
ceremonial life.

There is nothing particularly unique in the agreement between
position in institutional hierarchy and status ranking. What is
important, however, is the self -regulating autonomy, the localiza-
tion, the realized face-to-face participation which virtually all
members of the community, irrespective of their position, achieved
in activities with one another. Thus, although each person viewed
his place in the community from his own position, there was at
least a rough correspondence between his perceptions and reality.

Midwest Agrarianism and Main Street Towns : 85

Indeed, the intensity of the internal participation by all social
groups in the day-to-day activities of community life obscured
from view the sweeping changes that were then altering American
society. 29 Only rarely in the literature about small towns in this
period does there appear recognition that the social class system
was in process of dissolution and replacement by another type of
cultural differentiation which had its sources in metropolitan
civilization.

After the turn of the century the writings of the socially ori-
ented novelists record the flavor, sweep, and crisis of American
culture. Booth Tarkington in Alice Adams, The Magnificent
Ambersons, and in some of his lesser-known works portrays some
of the dislocations and tragedies which industrialism brought to
midwestern towns. 30 Sinclair Lewis, in Main Street and Babbitt,
is also concerned with the problem of change, and in Babbitt in-
dicates the early effects of the impact of a standardized industrial
civilization upon the town-community. 31 The cultural invasion of
industrial values and behavior finds a favorable response in the
spirit of Rotarianism, of Txustle," and of bigger and better things
now and to come. Change is equated with progress.

Curiously, it is in Point of No Return by John P. Marquand,
who writes of New York and New England, and in the deeper
and more spiritual expression by Thomas Wolfe, from the Pied-
mont South, in his You Cant Go Home Again, that the irrevo-
cable transformation of American culture is made explicit. 32
Marquand contrasts the town setting of an earlier period with in-
stitutional and suburban life in metropolis. He shows that the
routines of day-to-day living in suburbia center around the family
and children and the week-end communal gatherings at the
country club. In general there is a massed uniformity in the
style of Me, but the minute differences in occupational prestige
of the commuting male heads of families are accentuated in
social behavior through groupings in semi-exclusive cliques. By
comparison, town life was filled with a rich diversity of person-
alities and activities. Citizens from all social levels joined with
one another in annual community observances. But they also

86 : The Reality and the Promise

separated to form those smaller groups whose activities gave
expression to the cultural differences among them. The contrast
also shows, however, that the decay was within the town and
the vitality is within metropolis.

Independently and without intention, community studies and
the novels about community found common ground in the ex-
amination of social differentiation. We can generalize this agree-
ment by observing that social distinctions are based upon the
reality of differential participation in the affairs of the community
as well as upon the manifestations of values associated with one's
activities. When changes appear in the setting within which so-
cial distinctions are given expression, we would also expect, and
in fact we find, that the distinctions also change. Social differ-
ences do not disappear in the environment of metropolis, but the
bases upon which these distinctions are made have been altered,
and consequently their social and personal meaning has been
changed.

Education also possessed its apostles of change who although
nurtured within agrarian traditions heralded their metamorpho-
sis. It is to these prophets that we now turn. 33

5

PROGRESSIVE

EDUCATION:

THE TRANSITION

FROM

AGRARIAN TO
INDUSTRIAL AMERICA

The end of the first half of the twentieth century found tibe United
States at a peak in world prestige and power. The menace of
Soviet expansion and scientific advance to the democratic systems
of the American-led Western world had not yet been clearly
perceived. Internally, the nation had made an almost miraculous
conversion from war to peace. The honeymoon of postwar victory
had not yet been dissipated by the McCarthy investigations and
the contentions over civil rights. Still to come were the attacks on
the objectives and methods of American public education, in
particular the allegations that most, if not all, of the deficiencies
of the educational enterprise could be traced to the deleterious
doctrines of John Dewey and of progressive education as dis-
seminated over the years through the teacher training institutions.
In fact, the celebration in 1949 of John Dewe/s ninetieth birth-

88 : The Reality and the Promise

day had evoked world-wide recognition and acclaim for his
contribution to education. Who then could have possessed the
wisdom to foresee the reverse swing of the pendulum with its
denigration, if not abandonment, of a philosophical position
which had provided the basic ideology of the educational pro-
fession for so many decades? 1

It is an often stated truism that if we are to understand the
present, we must turn to the past. In this instance we turn back
at least three-quarters of a century to the incipient formation of
that great political, economic, and social movement which en-
compassed the era of progressivism. Within this movement, which
culminated in the New Deal, may be discovered the origin and
inspiration of the progressives in education. In essence, its
compound was that mixture of ideas and ideals, of social aspira-
tions and forms, of political and economic forces, sometimes in
harmony and sometimes in conflict, that moved America through
the difficult transition from an agrarian-commercial, town and
country civilization to the metropolitan-dominated, secular, and
scientifically oriented society of today.

Contrary to most scholarly and popularly accepted interpreta-
tions of the conflict of forces during this period, the viewpoint
that the progressives constituted conservative and stabilizing
forces within American society, during a period of accelerated
change, seems to us more tenable and insightful than any other.
The radical, and in fact probably revolutionary, position was
expressed by industrial capitalism. Its proponents and practi-
tioners, also marching under the banner of progress, were
utilizing new types of social institutions and introducing new
modes of thought that were bringing havoc to an older way of
life. The conflict arose in the attempts to direct and control the
direction of progress and, in particular, to contain and mitigate
the destructive threats of rampant capitalism. Progressives were
insisting that the power of the newly unleashed forces of social
and technological change be utilized for the fulfillment of the
American Dream and of the promise of America. In this insistence
they appear, in retrospect, as faithful to a conservative tradition. 2

Progressive Education : 89

Regarding the meaning of progressivism in education, we must
recognize straightway that any definition is subject to controversy.
The expression "progressive education** has been around for a
very long time and has been used to refer to any number of
very different programs and proposals for education. But we
will restrict ourselves to a particular group of men and ideas
in American education, that group which has recognized affilia-
tion with the distinctively American philosophy of pragmatism.
And about the very misunderstood term pragmatism perhaps the
less said the better. Fortunately, one seldom encounters any more
the vulgar notions that "pragmatism" stands for a repudiation
of truth, justice, and beauty, nor that the meaning of the term
can be accurately rendered by "Whatever works is right." The
two dominant themes in pragmatism were a devotion to the
methods of science and a firm adherence to the basic values of
the American agrarian tradition (not, please note, the values of
industrialism per se, as Bertrand Russell incorrectly asserted). 3

That group of thinkers and educators who built educational
doctrines on philosophical foundations of pragmatism, whom we
shall call the progressives, thus faced a major task of intellectual
synthesis and an equally difficult task of institutional reconstruc-
tion. For a synthesis of the methods of science and the values of
American democracy required two prior and original analyses.
Science had to be reinterpreted as something much broader than
merely the activity of a remote specialist in a laboratory. And
democracy itself had to be redefined so that it could have con-
crete meaning for a social world vastly different from the rural
frontier in which it had taken form and substance. 4 Finally, the
kind of school typical of the nineteenth century rural community
had to be completely transformed if it were to serve to transmit
the deeper values of the American tradition to the new generations
in their urban, industrial environment. As we follow their at-
tempts to solve these problems we shall see that in education, as
elsewhere in American life, the progressives were, in the deepest
and finest sense, conservatives.

90 : The Reality and the Promise

THE MEANING OF SCHOOLING IN AGRARIAN AMERICA

One thing is certain about the agrarian tradition in America: it
was versatile and hardy. In contrast with some of the exotic
cultures of the Caribbean that faded almost immediately upon
contact with the Spanish missionary and administrator, the
American agrarian culture perdured through the conquest of a
continent, through the violent resolution of its own internal
contradictions, through the absorption and incorporation of a
constantly changing stream of immigrants, and even through the
initial stages of the transformation of its technological and ecologi-
cal bases. It fell only as a victim of parricide, destroyed by its
own legitimate offspring contemporary industrialism. But like
one of its most representative figures, Old Jules, the agrarian
tradition resisted dying even when its time had come. 5

For following the universal pattern of cultures in transition, the
agrarian tradition in America did not change uniformly, but
rather shifted markedly in some respects while remaining re-
latively fixed and stable in others. Technological change pro-
ceeded more rapidly than the transformation of political institu-
tions. Symbolic codes took on new meanings in the context of
daily life, while remaining unchanged in external form. Thus
the immigrant groups who came to this country between the
Civil War and World War I would seldom consider changing the
words and rituals of their religious codes (though many in-
dividuals would simply abandon them altogether), but the actual
meaning of these codes in the everyday lives of men and women
underwent remarkable changes in this translation from one en-
vironment to another. Equally so the habits of thought of the
native born: the idea of absolute national sovereignty, for ex-
ample, remained (and too frequently still remains) unquestioned,
even after the world had reached the stage that this principle
led inevitably to periodic mass murder. Likewise, for reasons
that we shall try to understand, the content of school instruction
tended to change far more slowly than did the actual life situa-
tions of those who taught and attended school.

Progressive Education : $j

It is dear that for anyone who was going to remain stationary
in his agrarian community, 6 all that he would need to know, in
terms of knowledge, skills, and attitudes, he could learn uriihottf
schooling. What he could not learn without formal instruction
was how to move and change. And as the conditions of Me
changed around him, not to move and change was to fall be-
hind. Hence, the fact of being schooled became of great im-
portance, while the content of that schooling remained a
secondary matter.

This is plainly seen from the content of instruction in the
agrarian school. The cognitive aspect, that is the knowledge
transmitted, was largely of a kind of language usage far removed
from the actual spoken language of the community. One is not at
all surprised that at the level of the little attended secondary
school, language instruction should not be that of the local
community. In this country, as indeed throughout Western
nations generally in the nineteenth century, the secondary schools
taught Latin, possibly some Greek, and modern foreign languages,
while instruction in English was primarily in the literature of
England and New England. But even in the common school,
the elementary school, the language taught bore scant re-
semblance to the speech the youngsters heard in everyday life.
The persistent attempt to eliminate "anr t" from the vocabulary
of children was an Inescapable part of die elementary school
program. **We used to see the calf go down the path to take a
bath, but now we see the cahlf go down the pahth to take a
bahth," Thus chanted rural children in unison, explicitly recogniz-
ing that a different language system; was being offered them, the
language of city folks, of the East, f Mg business, of opportunity
and success. It didn't matter tha* this perception was by and
large false, that the classroom voice of the midwestern school
teacher would have seemed fust as quaint in a Boston drawing
room as would the more natural speech of her pupils. In the
parlors of Algona^ Iowa, Ibis marginal differentiation was noted
Mid respected. It marked the attempt to make a civilized, and
kence delineated, social order out of the erade egalitarianism of

92 : The Reality and the Promise

the frontier. It didn't matter particularly what knowledge was
taught by the schools; it did matter terribly that schooling provide
some basis of differentiation that had at least an ostensible relation
to life outside the agrarian community.

In the teaching of attitudes, especially moral attitudes, we see
the same basic phenomenon. The agrarian community was rich
in a variety of attitudes it could encompass with relative harmony
if not logical consistency. The saloon and the W.C.T.U. were
mutually dependent: without the demon rum, the good ladies
would have had nothing to attack; without the good ladies, the
customers of the saloon would not have been driven to drink.
There was prudery in the parlor and license in the hayloft; fear
of the stern, all-seeing God in the church and not-quite-honest
horse trading in the wagonyard; tunes that carried the repentant
to the altar of the revival preacher and bawdy parodies of them
afterward on the river banks. These apparently conflicting at-
titudes were reconciled in the day-to-day life of the farm-town
complex. Everyone growing up in the system knew that they
existed and moreover knew where in the system to find his own
resolution. For boys, at any rate, the morality of the community
was taught more effectively by the town loafers than by
McGuffey's Readers. How to distinguish between ""good girls*'
and "bad girls" and what was the appropriate treatment of each,
what were the acceptable causes for fighting and the rules that
accompanied it, just how much money one ought to spend for
specific articles, and the style of life for which one should aim
all these elements of the morality of daily living were learned
largely outside the school. But within the school the distinctive
contribution was made only in relation to life outside the com-
munity. McGuffey taught what his readers believed to be the
moral attitudes necessary to success in the city. Again, it didn't
matter that this perception was at least partly false. The city
was the locus in iniquity, and the agrarian boy or girl who was
to succeed there must be protected by a double dose of all the
Protestant virtues. The function of teaching these attitudes was
to enable the youngsters to move effectively toward a new life
outside the immediate environment.

Progressive Education 93

The skills taught in the agrarian schools, insofar as these skills
differed from the technical and social habits that were learned
just by living in the community, were essentially literary skills.
Were these skills also more related to life outside the agrarian
community than to life inside? Here a distinction has to be made.
Whereas in the agrarian village of other parts of the world a style
of life had been developed before printing became a dominant
role of communication, 7 it has been estimated that the practicing
farmer, storekeeper, and artisan of the frontier actually required
the reading and computational skills associated with about a sixth-
grade education in order to function effectively in those roles.
And whereas the frontier settlement of America never extended
far beyond the newspaper, the mail-order catalog, the record
books of the legal and business offices, and the ladies' poetry
circles, commercial farming and spreading industry put a demand
for literary and computational skill on agrarian America that
distinguishes it rather sharply from agrarian lif e elsewhere.

But these skills were not taught in their functional relation to
life as found in the local community. If the youngster learned to
read so that he could understand his local paper, that was happy
accident; for he was taught to read what might literally be called
escape literature. Exotic history, geography, biography, and
moralistic fiction constituted the bulk of his prescribed reading
diet. And it was the literary skills necessary to master this litera-
ture, literature that meant escape from the existing conditions of
life, that were demanded by many southern Negroes after the
Civil War. 8 Thus it may be said that the skill training in the
schools of agrarian America, like the knowledge and attitudes
they taught, was related only tangentially to the existential con-
ditions of life. This would explain in part why the content of
instruction could change ever so slowly while the world around
was changing ever more rapidly. There was essentially no relation
between the two.

The enormous importance of local control of schools was also
responsible for this relatively slow change in the content of
instruction. When American educators visited Europe in the
nineteenth century, they wore most impressed by the way in

94 ; The Reality and the Promise

which the schools on the Continent, especially in Germany, had
been redesigned to meet the demands of expanding industrialism.
Of course, they did not always perceive it in this fashion. They
thought they were witnessing the application of newer and better
ideas to the practices of schooling. 9 And they returned to extend
the application of these ideas to American schools. But one over-
whelming fact soon struck all of them: in Europe, new ideas
theories, philosophies, or concepts of education could be applied
and changes instituted as soon as a central agency was convinced
of their desirability. In America, the situation was quite different.
The local school boards in many states of the Union had almost
unlimited authority over the entire operation of the schools.

Even more important than the legal autonomy of the school
boards was the system by which American teachers were re-
cruited and trained. At the elementary level this system drew
almost altogether upon itself and recruited those who had been
taught the tilings the existing system taught. The teacher institutes
and training classes for elementary school teaching frequently
were operated under the jurisdiction of local boards of education
in the rural areas of the nation. Examinations for positions were
constructed around the actual skills to be taught in the elementary
schools. All this means that there was literally no place where
outside influences could be brought directly, consistently, and
deliberately to bear in changing the attitudes and perceptions
between generations of teachers. Thus, one of the dominant means
for changing education the centralized control for the training
of teachers existed in Europe but was unavailable in this
country,

A second feature of this system is that those who had been
most effectively educated in the total system of community
education did not want to return to local school teaching. We
have seen how the school itself was educating people to leave,
not to live in, the agrarian community. Those who had been
taught the posture of escape were not ready to forget their teach-
ing and remain put in the local community. The stories of success-
ful careers in the nineteenth century are full of the use of a rural

Progressive Education : 95

teaching job as a stepping stone to further education and
ultimately to employment in the city. Now this bears on OUT
problem in two ways. It means that the change-minded young
people in the schools were not primarily oriented toward chang-
ing the schools but in changing their own relation to it, that is,
in getting out. It also means that those who stayed m the rural
schools and who in any case did not stay in one community
very long were not likely to be the land of people who would
take it upon themselves to revolutionize the content of their
teaching.

These interrelated conditions were almost ideal f or keeping the
educational program of the regular school systems intact and un-
modified by reflex actions from the changes going on in the rest
of the society. Perhaps the most striking illustration of this is to
be found in the history of agricultural education itself. With the
passage of the Morrill Act in 1862 and its constant subsequent
extension through other legislation in support of agricultural
education, the nation built a magnificently effective system by
which research into farming methods could be carried out and the
results transmitted to farmers. Almost by accident, this system
of agricultural research and training was attached at several
levels to the regular school system and carried independently
from that system at other points. Now the initial expectation
might be that the connection between the agricultural program
and the rest of the school program would lead to some noticeable
interpenetration of the two. But with certain dramatic exceptions,
nothing of the sort occurred. 10 The academic curriculum of the
regular school system expanded slowly in both the city and
country to embrace the sciences and more advanced mathematics
and to include more elective offerings that might have some
vocational significance. These changes, however, came much more
decidedly from the sheer expansion of the curriculum itself
and from the longer time youngsters remained in school than from
any significant effect of the academic curriculum's being organi-
cally related to the program of agricultural education.

(The whole history of agricultural education is one paradox

96 : The Reality and the Promise

after another. The MorriU Act was passed as part of the grand
affiance in which eastern businessmen and abolitionists combined
with midwestera grain farmers to crush the Confederacy. Its
passage was supposed to protect the interests of the agricultural
elements of the nation. In effect, of course, it so increased the
productivity of farmers that they now constitute an insignificant
fraction of the population and will inevitably lose their unjustly
favored economic and political position. Sic semper tyrannis.)

We have emphasized the lack of relation between the program
of the local school and other features of agrarian community life.
This fact made the school an almost irrelevant institution for
those who were to remain in the local community. But from the
point of view of the nation as a whole, the agrarian school was
doing a very significant job and doing that job effectively. For
in preparing people to literally and figuratively escape from the
agrarian way of life, it performed its vital function in the larger
context of the changing American society.

THE PROGRESSIVES IN EDUCATION

As is true of the progressives generally in American life, the
progressives in education are too close upon us to permit anything
like a full evaluation of their efforts for social betterment. 11 They
recognized that a new society was a-borning, and they knew that
education had to become very different from what it had been if
it were to be of any assistance in relieving the birth pangs. But
this meant also that an old society was dying. Now a succession
of generations does not necessarily mean progress. It signifies
progress only if the new generation carries the finer things of the
old on to new heights. Were the progressives really willing to
give up enough of the old to make progress possible?

Notice that regionalism is exclusively an agrarian phenomenon.
It is symbolic that the three major figures associated with the
philosophy of progressive education came from the three major
regions of agrarian America. John Dewey from New England,
William Heard Kilpatrick from the South, and Boyd Bode from

Progressive Education : 97

the Old Northwest each was rural and Protestant in family
origin. Each reflected in his personal life and associations a deep
commitment to the public morality, that scarcely definable sense
of the fitness of things in relation to the general welfare, that
in the rural community distinguishes those who come to be re-
garded as its best people.

Still, despite Dewey's Vermont twang, Kilpatrick's courtly
southern manner, and Bode's close resemblance to Lincoln, not
one of this trio could rightly be regarded as merely a regional
figure. Certainly after the Civil War, and probably even before, it
was no more possible to be a really effective spokesman for
education than to be a major force in national politics, while
retaining a primarily regional identification. 12 Even in the Senate,
where Clay, Calhoun, and Webster had earlier spoken to the
nation in regional terms, Johnson, Watson, Borah, La Follette, and
Nonis made their national impact as representatives of economic
or social forces of trans-regional character. And even less than
their counterparts in politics could Dewey, Bode, and Kilpatrick
speak in purely regional terms to the emerging profession of
education. But neither were these men to be identified as repre-
sentatives of a particular class or economic group in the society
when they spoke in their capacity as philosophers of education.
It was only when they spoke., as they sometimes did in the
depression of die 1930*5, as representing specifically the farmer
or labor interest, that they tended to lose contact with the day-
to-day life of the school and its problems. Finally, Dewey, Bode,
and Kilpatrick made their impact, when speaking in their pro-
fessional voice, as representative of the values of the agrarian
tradition that were being threatened by die omnipresent cultural
changes around them.

Because the schools had been least affected by the changes
occurring in the culture generally, they constituted the last hope
of the agrarian way of life to preserve what was best in its system
by incorporating the changes into its way of life. 13 Progressive
education attempted to provide a basic outlook on the world that
would enable the coming generations to use the new technologi-

98 : The Reality and the Promise

cal power to achieve the older values The three major doctrines of
progressivism could be labeled its metaphysics, epistemology,
and axiology. But as for very good reasons the progressives
distrusted the traditional philosophical labels by which ideas are
categorized, it is more fitting to speak of the world view, the
theory of intelligence, and the conception of values in progres-
sivism. Let us begin with the theory of intelligence.

i. It has become generally accepted that the progressives*
theory of intelligence was erroneously labeled the "scientific
method." The actual procedures by which scientific discoveries
are made and tested bear resemblance to Dewey's theory of how
we think only in that both methods represent ways, albeit quite
different ways, of using human intelligence. 14 Dewey's model for
How We Think is neither Newton, Darwin, nor least of all
Einstein. His nearest model is Tom Sawyer. Life for Tom is a
series of existential involvements with a rather obdurate environ-
ment including people and things that seem constantly to get
in the way of his on-going activity. More than once Tom is
shocked out of a delightfully precognitive state of existence and
forced to deal with the recalcitrant objects and events that sur-
round him. He draws upon his culture for resources to deal with
recurring emergencies. And if that culture is not rich with all the
scientific and literary lore of Western civilization, it is at least
intimately known by Tom. It has become Tom's culture, not be-
cause he read it in a book, but because he has used it in as full
a sense as any human being can use the experiences of other
people in meeting his own problems.

But Tom is not a complete progressive hero. He lacks the ele-
ment of reflection, of backward looking. Like boyhood culture
everywhere, Tom's culture is composed of unchallengeable and
perennial truths, no matter how often experience shows them to
be fake. If only Tom had the intellectual curiosity of the boy
Edison, he would complete the picture. But the young Edison
himself would not do either, for he lacked Tom's feeling for the
immediate, the tangible, the esthetic experience. For Edison, the
world was only what it would do; for Tom it was what it was, a

Progressive Education - 99

Eving Ding an sich. But why not construct an educational system
that will provide a synthesis of Tom and Thomas Alva? Why not
teach Tom true beliefs about his world and teach him to know
these in a reflective, critical way? But do this without destroying
the sense of being engage that characterizes Tom's present way
of knowing the world? Notice that Tom's education came from the
entire community, his family being an already truncated version
of the producing-consuming unit of American Me, An education
given by the entire community digs deep into the habits of be-
havior of the individual, but it may educate falsely as well as
deeply. The dominant motive of the progressive was to combine
in one educational experience the maximum depth of personal
incorporation with the breadth and sureness of the scientific
traditions of Western civilization.

For if the two are disjoined, the coldly scientific way of know-
ing will destroy the kind of world in which Tom's richly personal
way of knowing can flourish. It will treat the world as a place of
lifeless material, to be manipulated for the sake of symbolic
success, not as a realm of human consummations. And if science is
separated from the context of human consummations, it will be
used apart from, and ultimately in opposition to, human ex-
perience. When Tom Sawyer becomes a grown man, the cultural
resources he knows so well will be of scant help to him against the
combination of money and science. But if Tom had learned
science in the same way he learned the lore of boyhood, in
cooperative ways with his fellows, he would be a match for any
competitor. What boys know together can be the basis on which
boys cooperate against their myriad natural enemies. Just so, if
the members of the Grange had known economics and agronomy
as intimately and directly as they had known their boyhood
culture, they would not have been the victims of eastern bankers
and railroads. Tom's way of knowing (but not young Edison's
way) was as much a method of social cohesion as it was a step
toward the individual consummatory experience.

2. In history there are no beginnings. Every phenomenon has
its analogues in some earlier phenomenon. The progressive con-

100 ; The Reality and the Promise

ception of what it means to promote intelligence, as described
here, is no exception. One could easily show that in their attempt
to rescue schooling from dry formalism by bringing the Me and
purpose of childhood into active play in classroom activities the
progressives were one with a tradition of educational reformers
going back at least as far as Augustine. But the progressives'
conception of intelligence was combined with (or, if you prefer,
derived from) a world view that could have appeared only after
the achievements of physics and biology in the nineteenth century.

From man's basic nature as a cultural animal arises the need for
an overall view of the world, for a psychologically satisfying (if
not logically consistent) set of ideas that can be given ritual
expression and enables the individual to relate himself symboli-
cally to his environment. The world view of the progressives
involved the substitution of an organic scientific conception of the
universe for the Protestant Christian view that had been standard
in the agrarian tradition of America. Nevertheless, the world view
offered by the progressives shared many features in common with
that which it attempted to replace.

When it is said that the world view of the progressives was an
organic scientific one, the intent is to avoid the frequently heard
charge that Dewey and others held a mechanistic conception of
the universe. The billiard ball metaphor of Hume and Laplace
had no role to play in progressive thought. In "The Influence of
Darwin on Philosophy," Dewey makes it quite clear that his
Hegelian mode of thought could never have been channeled into
a sympathy with modern science until science itself had acquired
a dialectical, rather than a mechanical, frame for the interpreta-
tion of its objects. 15 Change, growth, and emergence are as real
as the apparently eternal laws of motion.

The Weltanschauung of the progressives is expressed most
simply and movingly in the first few pages of KilpatricFs "Re-
constructed Theory of the Educative Process." 16 Here we see the
great polarities of philosophic thought organicism and mech-
anism, chance and fatality, good and evil related as mutually
inescapable aspects of the world people must live in. But even

Progressive Education 101

more important, we see men and women as continuous with the
rest of nature, adaptive organisms striving to maintain their
equilibrium in the face of constant disturbing stimuli. Judged by
its dramatic qualities, this is a signal achievement; it sets man in
his own habitat and gives him dignity and purpose without the
deceitful device of a (literal) deus ex machina. Taken just this
far, the progressive view of the world emerges as one appropriate
for heroes who neither ask nor expect any favors from the world
around them. The hero can find his moral purposes within him-
self, requiring neither cosmic nor biological sanctions.

But the progressives realized that most teachers are not heroes.
And so Kilpatrick explicitly propounds the moral obligations of
all those who are engaged in the teaching of children. As the
world offers no guarantee that good shall triumph over evil, it
thus becomes the duty of each individual to engage himself
actively in the overt, objective reconstruction of the world. By
a very obvious sort of connection, this duty translates itself into
that of promoting the adaptive intelligence, as described above,
of each individual boy and girl.

As in man the biological animal is continuous with nature. Like-
wise, man is a cultural and historical animal One does not have
to posit any external cause for cultural change, for culture, like
the cosmos itself, is inherently dynamic. And history, as the re-
cord of cultural evolution, offers no guarantee that progress is
assured. Men working cooperatively, and using their highly
evolved adaptive intelligence, may be successful in shaping their
historical destiny, or they may not. The existential dynamic forces
are supremely indifferent as to the outcome. In the practice of
politics, this view of culture and history required of the progres-
sives a sustained high courage that the Marxists, for example, did
not need to possess since the latter could occasionally relax in
the certainty that history was working for them.

3. Notice that as the world view of the progressives does not
guarantee that good will be achieved, neither does it provide a
defecation of the ultimate human good. Reticence on this point is
not accidental; it reflects the deep abhorrence of idolatry that

102 : The Reality and the Promise

characterizes both the Protestant and Judaic traditions. Proximate
goods can be pursued openly and cooperatively; final goods e.g.,
salvation can be known only in the sanctity of the individual
soul. Now education is necessarily an open, public affair; it
develops the kind of intelligence that enables men to pursue, both
individually and cooperatively, their proximate goods. And science
is the mode of human knowing that enables man to understand
the world around him and to control that world so that it yields
the stability and security necessary to the achievement of all
human purposes, whether proximate or final. Hence, education
must be concerned with promoting the kind of intelligence that
can use science in controlling the world. And the line of reasoning
has thus proceeded back to the original conception of intelligence
without more than casually touching the question of final or
eternal values. 17

Yet we do find such expressions as "consummatory experience,"
"restoration of equilibrium," and "sense of shared achievement"
in the educational writings of the progressives. Perhaps these
expressions, like the name of Yahweh, are but circumlocutions to
suggest the unspeakable. But in a more frequent phrase, we en-
counter the word democracy. This word came to symbolize two
of the most important aspirations of agrarian America. The first
was the struggle for economic, political, and social equality by
the agrarian regions vis-a-vis the industrial and commercial com-
plexes of the East The progressives in education were one with
the general progressive movements of the fifty-year period com-
mencing with 1875, and their peculiar contribution lay in teaching
people how to use knowledge in effective and cooperative fashions
for the achievement of their objectives. But there was a second,
a deeper, almost mystical sense of democracy on the Protestant
frontier. If eternal salvation was an unknowable, inexpressible ex-
perience of the individual soul, the nearest earthly, temporal equiv-
alent was the communion of equality among the elect. Here was
a contradiction that could never be resolved. The drive toward
social equality with the East required the kind of civilization that
cannot be achieved without strongly marked delineations in the

Progressive Education - 103

system of social relations. The local poet, or musician, or intel-
lectual, or slirewd banker could be as good as anyone in the East,
but only if he were a damned sight better than anyone else in
his local community. Yet he could not be better in such a way
as to threaten that underlying, that deeply sensed, feeling of
equality. This feeling has its European root extending beyond the
limits of our vision, yet the frontier experience gave it a distinctive
American tone, a tone that permeates the American concept of
democracy.

There is no way to describe this sense of equality to those who
have not experienced it. The poet may evoke the sentiment, as in
Carl Sandburg's 'The People, Yesf The reverential attitude it
engenders may be seen in Dewey's Common Faith. 18 Its power
for evil as well as for good may be understood by looking at the
Deep South, where a whole race is denied full humanity, since it
cannot be admitted to the sacred round table of white man's
equality. 19 But however difficult it may be to achieve, a rather
thorough sense of this feeling of equality is essential to anyone
who would understand the dilemmas of the public school
educator in contemporary industrial America. This mystique of
equality is called up whenever one raises such questions as
education for the gifted child, anti-intellectualism, local control,
and above all, religion and the public schools.

If there is any truth in the analysis given so far > it allows us to
understand both the radical and the conservative elements in the
progressive.

Consider now just how radically different from the agrarian
school would be the institution designed to preserve and extend
this conception of democracy in the new industrial civilization.
While the expression "the whole child" came to be associated in
the public mind with the progressives* conception of the school,
a much more descriptive expression would be "the whole com-
munity." For in the new ravironment, the school must provide
the whole range of educational experiences that had earlier been
given by an organic complex of community living. (Notice that
the expression ^educational experiences/' now dreadfully hack-

104 : The Reality and the Promise

neyed, is unavoidable if one is to make clear the progressives'
radically changed conception of the role of the school.) The
nuclear family, now a fact but even by 1910 the emerging pattern
for urban life, did not have the capacity to provide the deep
sense of continuity that the extended family system in an agrarian
setting gave to its young. The productive system of the urban
world was incapable of teaching its habits and customs to those
who would be the next generation of producers. The church, by
putting itself in opposition to science, by its deliberate ob-
scurantism and fundamentalism, had lost its capacity to give a
unified world view that would enable youth to establish an
intellectually satisfying picture of their relation to actual con-
ditions around them. And entertainment, now commercial rather
than communal, could no longer establish the joyous rituals that
related man to man.

Progressive education now undertook a revolutionary trans-
formation of the school into the agency by which a total, unified
education could be given to the youth of the nation! The very
conditions that made the school a marginal institution in the
agrarian community its separation from the constantly accelerat-
ing changes occurring around it enabled it to appear as a stable
base on which a new comprehensive education could be built.

The conservative aspect of this philosophy was the program to
preserve the core values of the agrarian society in the new in-
dustrial age. Yet the progressives were hard put to it when it came
to defining what these values actually were. For the final values
of the agrarian society were internal, personal, inexpressible. The
words freedom, democracy, and equality were but pale reflections
for the inner feelings they were supposed to represent; after a
time, even these words tended to lose their magical qualities as
evocative of the agrarian sense of values. In an age that lives by
symbols, changing fashions are inevitable. When the living basis
for the symbols is destroyed, change in fashions soon takes away
the quality of the words.

Just because the progressives steadfastly refused to erect a
symbolic system which they feared (and rightly) would become

Progressive Education : 105

an object of worship in itself, they were particularly vulnerable to
changes in fashions. Their value words arose out of the existential
conditions of life in agrarian society; when those conditions
changed a dreadful gap appeared between the words they used
and anything those words might stand for. The case of religious
freedom and education shows this gap quite clearly. Religious
freedom in the agrarian community did not mean religious in-
difference. Rural children could debate the various sides of the
doctrine of predestination with more than a little sophistication.
There was a choice among churches and there was the perfectly
respectable choice of being unchurched. Joining a church was a
kind of puberty rite implying, albeit not always achieving, the
exercise of uncoerced personal choice and commitment. An
entire system of relations with associated strong feelings were
involved in this complex, among them being the sense that there
was an inner grace which was the business of the individual to
manifest outwardly however he saw fit. The marginal status of
the agrarian school was nowhere more evident than in matters of
religion. Many activities in the agrarian school had vaguely pious
overtones; it was thoroughly permeated with the Protestant ethic.
These facts bothered no one particularly. Religious freedom con-
cerned two matters only: whether to join a church or not, and if
to join, of what Protestant denomination. The school fit into this
system quite well so long as it remained non-denominational. The
school did not have to be indifferent to religion per se, it simply
had to keep its hands off the open competition as each of the
denominations tried to capture its equitable proportion of the
community's youth. The system was certain to keep denomina-
tional churches small and poor, religious interest high, and school
interference at a minimum.

Now remove the concept of religious freedom from that social
system, and its meaning becomes extremely confused. By its very
nature, it cannot be explained in other symbols; it is an unde-
finable, primitive concept. Hence, when the separation of church
and state in education became problematical and the progressives
spoke of religious freedom, it was hard to see exactly what they

106 : The Reality and the Promise

were trying to conserve. They could not point to the agrarian com-
munity and say; "See the way those people behave and feel?
Well, we want to preserve that behavior and feeling." They could
not say this, because they were perfectly aware that the conditions
that made that sort of behavior and sentiment possible simply did
not exist any longer. And when they talked about the equivalent
in an industrial society for this system in the agrarian community,
they were forced back on legalistic, external arguments that
necessarily lost the real import of what they meant by "religious
freedom.*' 20

If we tried to follow the progressives in their defense of
education for personal fulfillment, for productive citizenship, or
for any of the other aspects of "education for democracy," we
should encounter the same basic gap. It is not that they said
nothing on these value questions; quite to the contrary, they filled
libraries with their arguments. But arguments are with words, and
eventually the words have to be connected in some recognizable
way with a non-verbal reality if they are to have meaning. In
1899 Dewey could talk about "the other side of life/* le., the
living alternative to the growing industrialism of Chicago at the
time, and his hearers would know well enough what he meant;
they would have had the direct experience with the world to give
meaning to the idea of an alternative. Forty years later this back-
ground of experience could no longer be assumed. Then the
question of final end arose when the possibility of an answer had
been lost. It is not essential that every system of thought have a
built-in answer to the question: "What is the ultimate human
good?" It has to provide an answer only if the question is genuine,
that is to say, only if an answer is actually necessary to distinguish
what is truly good from what may falsely appear so in the realm
of proximate goods. So long as a basic common understanding
prevailed, the progressives could say "democracy" and "growth
leading to more growth" and this was a sufficient answer to guide
proximate choices. When the common background that gave
birth to those words had disappeared, no amount of reiteration
could bring them to life again. The progressives had recognized

Progressive Education - 107

the dangers of delighting in words at the expense of what the
words mean, but the time came when their own symbols of value
lost connection with the living reality of the world around them.

PROGRESSIVISM AND THE MORAI, COMMITMENT
OF TEACHERS

It is not at all difficult to see how the system of thought we
call progressivism appeared out of the confluence of American
agrarian democracy with the rising industrialism and the intoxicat-
ing new developments in science. What is more difficult to ex-
plain is how it came about that this system of thought captured
the imagination and loyalties of so large a number of teachers not
only in the rural areas of this country, but most strikingly in
urban centers here and abroad. Perhaps as far as the United States
is concerned it is of significance that the period of the rise of
progressivism corresponded more or less exactly with the period
in which Americanization became the dominant job of the urban
schools. 21 We do not mean that there was a greater population
of immigrant children than native-born of native parents in the
schools. But, nevertheless, this job had an urgency and an im-
mediacy that was overriding in the perceptions of those personally
engaged in the teaching process. And at this moment the
progressives entered the educational scene with a charge to
teachers that matched in urgency and in moral determination
that same imperative sense the teachers themselves faced in
their day-to-day work.

To understand why the ideas of the progressives were couched
in terms of moral imperatives, we must remember the -conditions
under which change could be instituted in American education.
Not being dictated from the national level nor, except in externals,
from the state or county levels, the actual control of the teaching
procedure depended to a large degree upon the individual
teacher's perception of his task and function. In order to change
the practices in the schools, one had to change the heart as well
as the mind of the teacher. Scientific evidence from psychology,

108 : The Reality and the Promise

careful surveys of the existing state of human knowledge, and
precise predictions of social trends were valuable tools, but the
progressives had to translate these into the kind of language
that would resound in the inner consciousness of the teacher.
Thus, prior to Dewey, the language of progressive educators was
almost that of an apocalyptic vision. And even Dewey, who in his
logical works developed a style so dry as to be acutely painful,
pronounced his educational beliefs in the language of inspiration.

The release of ethical energy by the language of progressivism
may best be illustrated by looking outside the continental
United States. There is no better evidence of the propitious setting
for progressive ideals than in that spirit of urgency and determina-
tion with which American teachers assumed the responsibility of
teaching in the newly acquired colonies of Puerto Rico and the
Philippines following the end of the Spanish- American War. The
official definition of the task for which they had volunteered dif-
fered little from its requirements in an American school. But the
role which these teachers defined for themselves was quite dif-
ferent. They attempted to transmit the ^entirety of a cultural
system to children whom they believed to have been denied the
blessings of American life. Their schoolroom became the citadel
of American virtues, and its symbols were the flag and the
portraits of Washington and Lincoln. These were the lineal
descendants of the Yankee schoolmarms who went south with
the Freedmen's Bureau after the Civil War; they were the
ancestors of today's Peace Corps. But for a glorious moment as
their nation stood for progress in the world and they for progres-
sive education, the progressive movement provided an ideology
which they spread around the world.

Despite exaggerated claims by ignorant writers, 22 it is very
difficult to judge exactly how much and in what particulars the
conduct of American schools was changed by the progressive
movement. A possible candidate for being genuinely influential
was Kilpatrick's "project method/' especially after it had come to
be taught as the only acceptable basis for lesson-planning in
teacher training schools and incorporated as the form of chapter

Progressive Education - 109

organization in many elementary school textbooks (and thus, of
course, lost all organic connection with the fundamental premises
of progressivism). It is, on the other hand, eminently clear that
the "New Movement" in educational administration and the test-
ing movement associated with it really affected the content and
climate of a great many schools. 23 This claim is made on the
assumption that when the materials of instruction have been
changed and also the procedures for testing and evaluating
student performance, then a significant effect on the school has
been achieved. By this criterion, the spread of clearly progressive
practices from a relatively small number of pilot schools was
neither nonexistent nor yet a major social movement The lesson
is clear: the success and acceptance attained by the progressives
was in the realm of moral purpose, not in the translation to
educational procedures. In setting forth a noble conception of
the social role of education, they served America well and perhaps
more lastingly than the psychologists, for their contribution was
straight to the self-esteem of those who maintained the system
during times of unparalleled expansion, change, and travail.

If the prologue to the progressive movement occurred within
the rising tensions between an agrarian-commercial and an in-
dustrial-urban civilization, its epilogue appeared with the demise
of agrarian civilization and the triumphant emergence of metro-
politanism in the period between the two great wars. The spirit of
militant reform of the 1930'$ produced an environment favorable
to the conversion of progressive ideals into plans for action. These
proponents were the reconstractionists, the activists who believed
that the burden of building a new America lay within the realm
and responsibility of education. Two of them, George Counts and
John Childs, had received their own early schooling at a time
when the schools had yet been marginal to the society. Their
championship of the cause of education and their insistence that
the issues be debated at the loftiest level reflected a zeal worthy
of the puritan and pragmatic backgrounds from which they came.
But progressivism proposed more than a new definition of func-
tion. It insisted on the moral puipose of education. 24 It asked a

110 : The Reality and the Promise

commitment which, in its extreme form, assigned to the schools
the moral responsibility for the entire society. Seldom has any
group been charged with embracing a commitment of such
breadth and depth. If there were those who faltered it should
be remembered that the burden was heavy and that others in
American society failed to understand the necessity or the pur-
pose. The impetus for their cause was lost in a complex of forces
and factors; the most important of all, probably, was that America
had moved on. In any event, with the reluctant retirement of the
giants from the academic stage, there were few disciples to
perpetuate their arguments. Sic transit gloria mundL

But we cannot leave the progressives without expressing some
of our own feelings toward the movement. Our admiration and
respect are, we hope, evident throughout the chapter. Their abid-
ing legacy is this: neither in this country nor elsewhere in the
world may one mention schooling without raising visions of social
welfare and individual intelligence. That is deliberately putting
it negatively. It seems to imply that in their positive contributions
they must be regarded as having failed.

Did the progressives actually fail? One would know just from
the size of the question that its answer must be both Yes and No.
The case against them is quite damning. From Dewey's lectures
of 1899 to the going-out-of-fashion of both pragmatism and
progressivism, the program they set for themselves was to design
an educational system adequate to the transformation of America,
and to put that system into operation. By now it is quite clear
that even now American educators know neither what constitutes
an adequate education for the new society we live in nor how
to quickly and precisely change the conduct of our schools. We
know a good deal more than we used to know on both these
matters, enough in fact to make us rather humble in our
ignorance. Since 1899 we have solved certain problems how, for
example, to build, finance, and police a national highway system;
but we have failed to solve certain others how, for example, to
equitably finance medical care. Education falls clearly in the
second category. Insofar as the progressives were charged with

Progressive Education : HI

(or assumed) the responsibility of leadership and did not produce
lasting results, they were failures.

But there is another side. Because they took the broadest pos-
sible view of the school's responsibility in cultural change, they
could not, therefore, accept the purely technical context as the
most significant one in education. But it is only in the purely
technical context that problems are ever solved. Hence the
criterion for success or failure that we have been applying Did
they solve the problems? is not the only applicable test

In some ways education and highways are alike, and in those
ways educational theorists and highway engineers are judged
alike. Did a new way of designing an interchange reduce traffic
tie-ups? Did the use of a new programmed text result in more
rapid and retentive learning than did the old? In each case there
are fairly straightforward goals and fairly clear-cut connections
between technique and goal.

But the progressives restored an old (and purely academic)
interest into the living context of American education: the ques-
tion, What is education for? And they made the answer prob-
lematical in a way it had never been before. By refusing to accept
a priori or tautological answers, they forced educational attention
onto the social and cultural conditions of the times, onto the
plight of democratic values in the emerging industrial culture.
They thus set going an argument to which an ever increasing
proportion of the world's population (including the Communist
world) wiU be forced to attend.

Must we, then, grant a posthumous garland of success to the
efforts of the progressives? Yes, perhaps in a curiously dialectical
fashion they were all too successful. The indictments on this bill
are many and grievous. First, as they turned the attention of
educational theorists away from mere technique, so they turned
the attention of the most capable theorists away from pedagogical
technique altogether. The consequence was exactly what anyone
would have foretold. Only in the past few years have we seen a
reunion of fundamental consideration of the technical problems

112 : The Reality and the Promise

involved in teaching with equally fundamental consideration of
what the enterprise is supposed to be for. 25

Second, the inspiring language of moral exhortation with which
the progressive movement began has degenerated into jargon
and cliche. 26 This would be objectionable enough on purely
esthetic grounds, but there are more serious consequences still.
So long as the effort to change education was focused on driving
new beliefs and attitudes into the heads of teachers, the political
and economic conditions affecting the schools could be ignored.
The final upshot of this tendency may be seen in the 1961
publication of the Educational Policies Commission of the
National Education Association of the United States and the
American Association of School Administrators, a publication
grandiosely entitled The Central Purpose of American Educa-
tion. 27 In twenty-one beautifully printed pages the Commission
presents a collective and confused summary of the Socratic
argument on the primacy of knowledge among the virtues. Need-
less to say, the wit, irony, and drama of the Protagoras are
notably missing. Also missing is any recognition whatsoever of the
institutional arrangements within which operating decisions
on educational policy actually occur, where "purpose" comes
to mean what we genuinely purpose doing. This regrettable
tract cannot be blamed solely on the tendency of the progres-
sives to speak of education in the language of moral imperative.
But neither can they be held blameless.

The obverse needs attention also. There are times in a civiliza-
tion when moral imperatives, at the highest level, and directed
squarely toward the exigencies of the moment, need to be brought
forward to enlist the basic commitments of all the individuals
who are truly members of that civilization. The record of the
great public statements by political and religious leaders of this
nation, more than any other one thing, is the collective conscience
of America. But nothing is so easily debased as is the language
of moral imperative. When every statement, even though it be of
the slightest moment, is couched as, "We must . . ."; "The future
of our nation requires us to . . ."; etc., then one soon learns

Progressive Education 113

to ignore the voice of the collective conscience. Even if the Edu-
cational Policies Commission had happened to have something to
say, they would have been ignored. For this debasement also,
the progressives cannot be completely absolved.

Third, and finally, the accusing finger must be pointed squarely
at John Dewey for a fundamental inconsistency in social theory
that has plagued those liberal, democratic educators who have
tried to take seriously the social function of schooling. On the
one hand, Dewey accepted the premise that political form is not
itself a primary matter but rather something that follows upon
the more basic and dynamic social forces. This premise is Marxian,
without question, but it also has deep roots in American social
thought, in Thomas Paine, James Madison, and Thorstein Veblen,
just to mention a few Americans who have explicitly accepted
the premise. Dewey recognized, of course, that the basic social
dynamism of our day is found in expanding technology. On the
other hand, Dewey developed a steadfast adherence to one single
political solution for the ills of contemporary life, namely, die
establishment of democratic socialism. 28 Dewey saw his own age
as one of crises, as a transitional period between a static equilib-
rium of the past and a dynamic equilibruim of the future. 29
His vision of the future included communal control, through
public agencies, of mass industries whose workers would be not
mere appendages to machines but rather cooperating citizens in
the control of their own destinies. His sense of political organiza-
tion, like his sense of education itself, derived from his theory
of intelligence: What are the required social arrangements to de-
velop habits of collective, cooperative problem-solving in the
public?

The inconsistency? Simply this: changing technology would no
more spare the cooperative community of industrial workers
than it had spared the New England village life from which
Dewey's social vision had sprung. As technology becomes allied
with science, and as the laboratory (whether industrial or aca-
demic) comes to command a sizable proportion of our national
income and an even larger proportion of our most talented young

1*4 s The Reality and the Promise

men and women, then social changes of so radical a nature that
Dewe/s vision could not comprehend them become common-
place. Under those conditions it becomes senseless to hold on to
one single idee fixe concerning the right form of political organiza-
tion; it contradicts the first premise with which this discussion,
and Dewey himself, began.

There is a lesson to be learned from Dewey's mistake here.
In the final analysis his conservatism overcame his devotion to
change, growth, and process. Deeply convinced that ultimate
human values were to be found only in a particular form of face-
to-face community, 30 Dewey was so concerned to see that com-
munity survive and grow that he forgot to notice one peculiar
fact: the world no longer has a place for it. The full acceptance
of change does not admit of the reservations which Dewey never
overcame. It is fruitless to berate Dewey for not being an omnis-
cient prophet, for not recognizing in the embryo before him the
full structure that has since emerged. 31 But we have to acknowl-
edge and accept that structure. We cannot regard Tom Sawyer
as an acceptable model for intelligence in the modern world.
Neither can we take the Vermont village of Dewey's childhood
as representative of the needed social commitment in our time.

6

METROPOLIS

IN
TIME AND SPACE

During the past quarter century the pace of social and cultural
transformation in the United States has quickened. We can now
view tiie boom and depression of the late twenties and early
thirties as the agonized death throes of an earlier form of society.
From this period of low tide in the national spirit and well-being,
a dominant culture-type previously emergent in tie industrial
railroad cities has appeared, a new civilization which is as differ-
ent from the town-community which it supplanted as the latter
was different from the smafl former frontier agrarian community
of Jefferson and Jackson that was its predecessor. By "different"
we mean modification or decline in older types of groupings and
the rise to dominance of others, new symbols and new meanings
for old symbols, altered values and spirit expressing those values;
in short, we mean a reconstituted form of culture.

116 : The Reality and the Promise

The demographic expression o this new civilization is
metropolis. Today almost all America lives either within the
physical limits or under the shadow of the influences of the great
urban concentrations. Their social structure is epitomized in the
great superstructures of government, industry, education, health,
and commerce, in the isolated conjugal family of parents and chil-
dren, the family of "togetherness," and in the ephemeral but
repetitive gatherings of the "lonely crowd." These groupings
include the extremes of cohesion and atomization.

This new society demands of the individual an enormous
capacity for mobility in the frequent changes of residence from
one locality to another, in the shifts from one job or position to
another, and even in changes in occupation or profession. It values
in the individual his capacity for "adjustment," which is stressed
in the new psychology, and his ability to work with others in
a "team,'* which may be learned in "group process." It is a
civilization which through organization and technology provides
a theoretical and potential freedom and autonomy to the indi-
vidual that in past epochs were the privilege of a minority only.
It is a civilization which views change as inevitable and desirable
and, as a consequence, understands the past less as the source
of the present than as a concern of academicians. It is a civiliza-
tion which, if it does not founder on the rocks of material pros-
perity and destructive leisure or of the senseless exhaustion of
resources through competitive armaments, can achieve the stars.
The literal search for the star is a quest demanding our best
energy, resources, and intelligence. But the figurative stars are far
more important, not as a Utopia, but as the restoration of the sense
of wonder in the harmony of the universe.

Institutions and human activity, no less than the stars, can be
shown to express orderliness in their dynamics. The external
form of hamlet, town, or city reveals, in part, the lives of those
who are their occupants. Although the reconstruction of the
central city and surrounding suburbs has not been a product of
overall conscious planning, their transformation reflects the new
social arrangements and correlative values of our modern world.

Metropolis in Time and Space : 117

In the description of metropolis we shall seek for that orderliness

of which we spoke. 1

THE DEMOGRAPHY OF METROPOLIS

The triumph of an urban-industrial way of life is unquestion-
ably the most important social fact of recent decades. When we
remember that only one hundred years ago 75 percent of our
population consisted of farm families and that today they num-
ber under 10 percent, we can appreciate the magnitude and
rapidity of the change. Although statistics of population dis-
tribution and occupation can tell only a portion of the story, they
provide a picture of the transformation that has taken place.

The present population is estimated at slightly over 180
million. Of this number approximately 113 million are concen-
trated in 212 metropolitan regions. 2 The greatest concentration
of population is found within thirty-two metropolitan areas
stretching along a 6oo-mile belt from New Hampshire to Virginia
and counting 31.5 million inhabitants. Over the past decade the
suburban areas within this "super-city** increased 44.2 percent
while city population declined 2.8 percent. This is the pattern of
change found everywhere in the nation. 3

Thus within the demographic pattern of ever greater urban
concentration the larger cities axe in slow decline while suburbia
booms. Urban population rose to 70 percent of the total in 1960,
an increase of six percent over 1950, but the 28-million gain in
numbers during this decade took place in urban centers and 97
percent in metropolitan areas. Yet eleven of the twelve largest
cities (Los Angeles was the exception) declined in size. The
difference is explained entirely in terms of suburban growth,
which counted two-thirds of the total increase. Suburban popu-
lation increased almost three times faster than the rate for the
nation as a whole and accounted for half of the total gain.

Population density also exhibits great variability. There are
sections of New York City where density approximates 100,000
per square mile. In contrast, the horizontal suburb of single-

118 : The Reality and the Promise

family dwellings ranges between three and five thousand per
square mile, and in those localities where zoning laws demand
two or three acres per dwelling, the density may drop to one
thousand or less. Density, however, may be a widely fluctuating
factor. As an example, the City of London proper is one square
mile in size. It has a permanent resident population of only 5,180
but a working population of 375,000 who daily pour into and out
of its heart Comparable figures for American cities also show a
similar ebb and flow of workers in their downtown districts.

But daily mobility is only one aspect of the problem; available
statistics establish that residential mobility is of major importance.
It is estimated that one family in five changes its residence each
year. This includes those who move from one locality to another
within the city, to and from the suburbs, and from rural areas.
The extension of industrialized-scientific agriculture to the rural
South and to Puerto Rico has resulted in displacement of an
agrarian population which is directing itself cityward. In the
decade from 1950-60, Negroes in the North increased from 4.2
to 6.5 million and in the West from less than 600,000 to over a
million. They have also moved into southern cities but not in
such proportions. The growth of the urban South has come from a
small southward trickle of whites but more particularly from
southern rural whites. The migration of over half a million Puerto
Ricans, primarily to New York City, has been an added factor of
population growth.

Concurrent with the migration of a displaced and depressed
agrarian population to the cities has been the outward movement
of city folk to the suburbs. This migration has also been selective
in that it is composed primarily of persons with incomes and
occupational skills traditionally associated with a middle class.
The consequence of this population adjustment has been to in-
crease the proportions of the working class and to decrease those
of the middle class for the central city. Although the outward
movement to the suburbs may have been accelerated by the in-
flux of new population to the cities, it is much too simple to
attempt to explain the movement by this factor alone. England

Metrop0IIs In Time and Space : 119

has had no sizeable rural population nor a sizeable alien accre-
tion to its cities for many decades, but it is experiencing a com-
parable type of suburban growth. To a greater or lesser extent the
forces of urban change and suburban spread are manifesting
themselves in all the cities of the world. The outskirts of Paris,
Rome, Beirut, Teheran, and Sao Paulo all exhibit rapidly growing
suburban populations. Actually, the movement in America goes
back several decades. Originally, semi-country living was
pioneered by the upper middle class. But with the advent of the
automobile, a means of inexpensive and flexible transportation,
this style of life (or some variant form of it) was made available
to a vastly increased number of people over a vastly expanded
area.

The metropolitan-urban concentration of today presents a
continually altering pattern that is different from the railroad
metropolis of an earlier epoch. 4 With the exception of Los
Angeles and a few newer cities, it is characterized by a central
city, the heart of which contains the major business, financial,
civic, and amusement activities, and by satellite towns and
suburbs. Its real hinterland, the territory into which its influence
readies and from which it derives sustenance and recruits popula-
tion, as in the case of New York, may be world-wide* But such
centers as Atlanta, Kansas City, and Salt Lake City constitute
regional counterparts.

The concentration of population and expanded territorial
habitat is partially a response to the growth of the city's organiza-
tional function accompanied by a parallel concentration of eco-
nomic and social functions and power. There has not been,
however, a comparable centering of industrial activity. On the
contrary, the outward dispersion of population, which the auto-
mobile hastened, has also aided decentralization of industry. Im-
proved facilities in the transportation of workers, raw materials,
and finished products have helped establish both heavy and light
industry ever farther from the immediate concentrations of popu-
lations. The industrial park and the isolated open country indus-
trial plant have become commonplace.

120 : The Reality and the Promise

The decline of the central city as a producing center is only
one of several changes that may be observed. No longer are the
extremes of skid row and Gold Coast so apparent. These sections
are being replaced by new housing developments, and by civic,
educational, health, and commercial centers. And concurrent with
these changes has been a gradual transmutation of the belts and
districts which once gave expression to ethnic and racial distinc-
tions and divisions and to differences of social class and occupa-
tion, the exceptions being those cities which have received large
increments of rural migrants. Although remnants of these spatially
segregated cultural divisions may still be observed, they are as
vestigial as the pockets of subsistence farming which may still be
found in the backwaters of our agricultural states. The process of
reformation has not resulted, however, in a homogeneous popula-
tion devoid of internal distinctions. Quite to the contrary. The
separation and variety of differences have been intensified and
have appeared in new spatial distributions, which, unless they
are carefully observed, give the illusion of conformity and unity. 5

Inevitably and increasingly the city is creating an intricate
mosaic pattern expressed in settlement and activity. Societal
functions of health, education, commerce, finance, transportation,
entertainment, and government are illustrative of a few of the
specialized activities which are continuing to concentrate in
special areas. Physically the separations remain interconnected
through communication, while sociologically they are interrelated
through organization.

The emerging pattern of the central city will be clearer if we
give brief attention to the form which preceded it and which is
being recast to give expression to the new social and cultural
realities. Burgess was the first to conceptualize the form of the
American city for us as a giant circle concentrically zoned around
a hub. 6 The commercial district claimed the heart of the city
which was surrounded by a zone of deterioration, an area of light
industry and family dwellings which had been converted into
residences for a migratory population of unmarried young people
and newly arrived ethnic or racial groups. The instability of its

Metropolis in Time and Space : 121

population was combined with a high incidence of crime, suicide,
disease, and other pathological characteristics.

Surrounding this area was the zone of working class residences,
a location permitting easy accessibility to the light industries
which stretched in a ribbon pattern along the spoke-like railroads
which fanned outward from their termini in the hub. Middle and
upper income districts constituted outer zones of largely single-
family residences, and beyond lay the open country and autono-
mous towns and villages. Suburban developments, closely linked
to the railroad network which provided rapid transit into the
city's hub, had also begun to appear. The growing system of free-
ways has now supplemented and in some instances displaced the
railroads which once provided the major arterial connections with
the outlying portions of urban settlement

Districts with specialized function remain a characteristic of
the urban pattern, but they are no longer so tightly grouped, and
the residential pattern has undergone considerable alteration. The
great masses of newly arrived immigrants are no longer relegated
to a zone of deterioration as their first point of entry and settle-
ment. The massive resistance of ethnic concentration and
residential district has been broken so that in addition to the
belts of concentration, like those of the Black Belt of Chicago and
Harlem of New York, there are few sections which do not have
then- cell-like clusters of the newly arrived adjoining or nestled
within the residual pockets of the middle class, those survivors of
the exodus to the suburbs.

The bulk of the city's population is now composed of the
working class: the white-collar workers of bank, office, store, and
government bureau and the highly paid blue-collar workers in
communication, construction, repair, and light industry, both of
these groups seemingly held by the canons of lower middle class
propriety; and the semi-skilled and the unskilled, many of whom
are the newer migrants from an agrarian environment. Theirs
is an anomalous economic position.

The life-style of this latter group constitutes a genuine alterna-
tive to the dominant cultural pattern found elsewhere in the

122 : The Reality and the Promise

country. Unskilled labor, because it is cheap and available in the
largest cities, can economically survive there long after it has lost
its market value elsewhere. The technically necessary tasks, the
lifting and hauling, washing and cleaning, scraping and painting,
digging and pounding that are rapidly being turned over to
machines In newer and more accessible areas, remain as jobs in
our largest and oldest cities. The fantastically high costs of
construction and reconstruction in the cities mean that only
corporations seeking favorable tax write-offs can construct new,
automated, and efficient buildings. The vastly larger proportion
of the city's work is done under technological conditions that
make unskilled labor a readily saleable commodity; the availa-
bility of that labor makes it cheap. Welfare services of many
kinds subsidize both employers and employees. And inevitably
a cultural pattern appears offering a peculiarly secure and stable
life to replace that to which the migrant knows neither he nor
his children can return. Opening of the suburbs and raising the
technological level of social services in our cities are inevitable,
but the consequences for the city's working force have yet to be
calculated.

The middle-class remnant is composed of professionals, young
unmarried college graduates, the aged, the new bohemians
described by Lynes, 7 and the successful executive who, when his
children have left the home, has returned from the suburbs to
take up residence in the elegant and highly protected newer
apartments.

The urban pattern we have described applies to American
cities which came to prominence with the development of rail-
roads, industrialization, and heavy European immigration. Urban
concentrations in the South and West developed later and in
response to different conditions. They do not exhibit an identical
type of internal differentiation; their population accretions have
come primarily from old American stock; and new forms of
transportation have permitted and enforced greater dispersion
of population and industrial activities. 8

Metropolis in Time and Space : 123

LOS ANGELES: AN ALTERNATIVE METROPOLITAN TYPE

Los Angeles may be counted as representing a newer form of
metropolitan organization. Whatever its distinctive qualities, it
should not be as cavalierly dismissed as in an article in The New
York Tmes which described it as **a horizontal monster crawling
almost endlessly from the sea to the desert and mountains."
Monster or not, the Los Angeles pattern is one toward which
other metropolitan areas are moving. For that reason alone
ft is worthy of careful examination. 9

Today its metropolitan region contains over six million persons
living in the central city and 49 separately incorporated surround-
ing communities. These latter are dependent upon Los Angeles
proper for those public services and governmental functions
usually associated with separate municipalities. In fact manage-
ment of the public schools remains about the only public function
for which control is almost wholly localized. It may indeed be
highly significant that the dominating feature of the downtown
area is a huge and growing civic center, as is the case for several
other western cities.

In contrast with other cities, there has been no comparable
centralization of merchandising, entertainment, light industry, or
professional services in a central hub. These activities are
localized in the endless miles of strip development, the shop%
offices^ and service stations which line tie major streets and the
newer, compact, and inclusive shopping centers built to accom-
modate a population on wheels. Incoming industries have not
competed for centrally located costly space along railroads and
near sources of labor supply but have scattered themselves in
open countryside which was soon filled with the split-level and
ranch houses of tract developers.

Los Angeles has proved that it is no longer necessary to con-
centrate the traditionally downtown activities in a central hub. Al-
though areas of specialized activity persist, they are widely
separated one from another within the wban spread and at the

124 : The Eeality and the Promise

same time united by complex systems of communication,
technology, and organization.

Informality as a style of living has reached its greatest emphasis
in the cities and suburban portions of California and the South-
west. It may be seen in dress and mannerism, in entertaining and
leisure, in relations between male and female and old and young.
Ease in establishing and terminating relationships is a necessary
trait in a culture which demands mobility of its members. And
in the spatial arrangements of the Southwest and Pacific Coast
the physical mobility which permits assembly and dispersal is
highly developed.

Although California climate contributes to the pleasures of
outdoor living, this factor alone cannot explain the manner in
which land surrounding one's house is utilized for a new style of
life. The ideal is for each householder to possess all of the
requirements for leisurely and relaxed living. There is the garden,
patio, barbecue grill, and swimming pool. The troublesome mix-
ing at public facilities is, thereby, avoided and the range of social
contacts reduced. The physical arrangements limit gatherings to
family and friends but produce a spatial isolation from the im-
mediate environs.

Elsewhere in America the same pattern of exclusiveness for the
nuclear family within relatively homogeneous surroundings has
made its appearance. But those who inhabit the Greenwiches,
Dariens, Beverly Hills, Forest Parks, or Levittowns are carefully
screened in the great winnowing process which unites and
separates those who are similar and dissimilar. The suburb has
become the residential spatial expression of the complex hier-
archies of government, business, industry, or profession which
organize and direct the American system. 10

THE FACE OF THE CITY

The face of the city which most of its inhabitants would
recognize is found neither in the upper echelons of Executive
Suite 11 nor among the dispossessed depicted by Nelson Algren. 12

Metropolis in Time and Space : 125

These are the extremes of privilege and privation. Chayefsky has
caught some of its pivotal flavor and action in his drama Marty. 13
He portrays an environment deeply segmented into circumscribed
locales composed of adjacent streets containing dwellings, shops,
and tiny service establishments. Companionship among youth
and men, and sometimes women, is sought on the street or within
the corner bar. These groups may have originated in childhood
days, as described by Whyte in Street Corner Society, 14 or they
may be the fleeting association of sidewalk or bar stool.

There is no necessary relationship, however, between the life
and needs of the family and the street or bar-gathered group and
those who sell the goods and provide the services. No human
requirement demands or encourages that resident and mer-
chandiser join together for communal goals. Police and fire protec-
tion, sanitation, education, entertainment, and in most instances
even religion are determined and controlled from afar. The
decisions which determine their quality and availability are not
matters about which there is direct control. Protest, complaint, or
perhaps influence is the available device through which one may
be heard. During the decades of boss rule, the ward heeler and
precinct captain provided a living link between the little man and
the remote powers of government. Today the connection between
citizen and civic activities is tenuous at best.

The same discontinuity also exists in other areas of life. Al-
though the resident may be employed within his own circum-
scribed neighborhood, there is no necessary or functional rela-
tion between the two nor between those with whom he works
or serves and the other aspects of his social or political life. The
greater likelihood is that his place of employment is at some dis-
tance, and except for those personal aspects of status, material
reward, or individual satisfaction, his source of livelihood and
occupation is quite irrelevant to familial, social, political, or com-
munity behavior. The exceptions, however, are of major im-
portance, for they control one's ability to satisfy many needs of
life, and they are doubly important in a situation in which their
effects are limited primarily to family and peers. Kin and friends,

126 : The Reality and the Promise

and possibly some associates from the place o employment, are
the only ones with whom there can be a sharing of the minor
victories and defeats which one experiences in the world of work
These are the ones whose judgment counts; others neither know
nor care. It is not that the world of work does not have meaning.
It does. But its meaning is perceived in terms of the individual's
relation to his intimates. The contribution which the worker may
make to the social whole is incidental and remote, for the organi-
zation in which the work is performed is elusive. It is abstractly
referred to as the office, shop, bank, or company. The separation
between the circle of intimates and one's work is nearly complete.
The urban neighborhood is not necessarily mean or hopeless,
but its orbit is narrow and remains unenriched by the larger
environment. Its tendencies are to encapsulate its inhabitants
ever more tightly until there remain only the gossiping old
cronies who, in good weather, habitually sit upon the tenement
stoop in the older city and exchange passing comment upon the
moving scene of the street. Among the more affluent there is the
isolation of the widowed person or married pair who inhabit
the apartment hotels and whose social relations are limited to the
doorman, the nearby tradesmen, and occasional dutiful visits of
grown-up children. Middle-class neighborhoods differ only in
degree from those of the working class. The street has ceased to
be the focal center of life, although adolescents may gather in
the vicinity of neighborhood drugstore or cafe. Daytime brings
forth clusters of young mothers to assemble with infants in an
available protected spot. In the morning and evening there are
the inevitable strollers with dogs attached to leashes, protective
devices which, startlingly, are also used to limit the ranging
of small children. In these areas of middle- and upper-range
housing one may observe those human and physical barriers
doormen, watchmen, and walls which serve the double pur*
pose of protection and enforcement of privacy but which also
imprison those whom they secure. These barriers give symbolic
expression to the isolation of family and self, a separatism that

Metropolis in Time and Space : 127

is intended to exclude tie uninvited but is also a measure of the
extent to which the centripetality of life has progressed.

The middle class resembles the lower in the lack of op-
portunity to take part in problems which could unite them with
their peers. Their isolation from one another may actually be
greater than that of the working class, for within this latter group
the extended family of old-world ethnicity and imported customs
of coffee house or bodega give some unity which moderates the
isolation. And though all groups may share in the communion
of church or synagogue, and occasionally of the school, these
are activities that at best bring the like-minded and the culturally
similar together and reinforce that which is already customary
and perceived.

The final notch along the scale of pecuniary and prestige stand-
ing belongs to the Social Register. Their identification may be
a confusing experience, for in New York and in other American
cities there is no one elite which stands squarely astride the social
pyramid. Instead, there are a number of elites, each of which is
related to the diversity and variety of population which composes
the city. The day when a Ward McAllister could preside as an
arbiter of social acceptability has passed. Today the divisions are
drawn along religious, occupational, and status lines, although
among the "upper bohemians" and at the very top the lines may
cross. Old family, Protestant city families still constitute the
remnant of a once solidly entrenched Thigh society.** In New
York, unlike Boston or Philadelphia, their ranks are continuously
augmented by successful outiander parvenus. The Catholic elite
remains strongly identified with its church and circulates m the
orbit of its hierarchy. Hie top echelon of the Jews is measured
by the magnitude of its philanthropic activities and its contribu-
tions to Jewish culture. An additional elite is Cafe Society formed
by the International Set and stars of the entertainment world.
Urban Negro elites have long existed and add their uniqueness to
the variety.

But metropolis is much more than its variegated human popu-
lation, its circumscribed neighborhoods, and homogeneous

128 : TEe Reality and the Promise

suburbs more than contrasting styles of life expressed in class dif-
ferences. These cultural aspects do not in themselves call forth
the endless movement of people and goods nor explain the
vitality which casual observation verifies. Nor should the char-
acteristics we have described be thought of as causes. They
should more properly be viewed as manifestations of individuals
engaged in activities whose sum total appears as a neatly bal-
anced system of interlocking cooperative endeavors. Material
goods are produced and distributed; services are maintained;
young men and women marry and beget; and all ages die. Man
learns, works, and plays. But whatever the activity or event, it
occurs within the context of customary practices and established
groups. The flow of life itself sets the limits of our inquiry. Our
problem now becomes one of looking beyond the manifest char-
acteristics of metropolis and seeking the nature of the systems
and subsystems within which event and activity occur. Our
ultimate goal remains that of tracing the existing or absent inter-
connection and correspondence between the characteristic and
cultural perception of the individual and the structure of the
groupings in which he participates. Only then may we begin to
speak with some assurance of the images which different sorts
of human beings hold of themselves and their world and of the
commitments by which they are bound.

One may expect that the great metropolitan masses will never
perfectly resemble each other. Those of the East Coast will
retain both by design and by the limiting restrictions of the
past an appearance which links them to old-world urbanism and
to the newer American industrialism. Midwestern cities will not
completely lose their touch of Main Street. Those of the West
will continue relatively unfettered by past rigidities which inhibit
further change. But East or West, the great similarity will be
found in the correspondence between the type of social groupings,
functions, and activities and their representation within the
great social superstructures of industry, business, and govern-
ment.

Metropolis in Time and Space ; 129

SOCIAL DIFFEBENTIATION AND METROPOLITAN CULTUBE

On the surface the new American of metropolitan background
seems equalitarian and conformist, a perception which paradoxi-
cally is both true and illusory. The insistence upon democracy
in public is supported by a mythology which denies fundamental
differences among men and is often accompanied by the fiction
that each man's opinion counts as much as that of any other.
The insistence upon equality is being written into legislation
which prohibits discrimination based upon race, color, religion,
or national origin and with a strong tendency to include sex and
age as additional elements. In contradiction to those who in the
1930*5 feared that social classes were crystallizing with a diminu-
tion of social mobility, there exists today a wider range of oppor-
tunity and an approximation to the condition that each man can
advance as far as his abilities and the wheels of fortune permit.
The illusion of conformity receives additional support from the
general upward leveling in the access to consumption goods and
the consequent democratization of the "pursuit of happiness."
In its extreme form there is the insistence that all persons are
equal to all others and especially equal if there is a suspicion of
social superiority.

The conditions of life reinforce the illusion. Within the city
the pattern of interaction reduces contact with others. And the
majority of existing relationships are casual; that is, they have
no essential meaning in terms of the problems of the locality or
of the larger community. Social separatism is accentuated through
the limitation of movement and activity to those who are similar.
The situation in the suburb is only slightly different, and although
there may be opportunity for greater spatial movement, it occurs
within social boundaries which enclose a more rigorously homo-
geneous and restricted environment than is the case in the city.

In the once prevalent town-community type of organization
the basis for defining social class depended upon a configuration
of cultural elements which represented organic subcultural sys-
tems. One face of the system was the spatially compact residential

130 . The Beality and tiie Broffiise

area for each class. Its other face was the type of community as-
semblage which brought all or a representative part of the citi-
zenry together for communal purposes. Under these conditions
the child, as he moved toward maturity, could have direct ex-
perience through participation and observation with those of his
own and other social groups. Each individual from time to time
expressed and reaffirmed his position and that of others in group
life and class structure and thus acquired a sense of community
as a whole. By contrast, the cultural limitations within the homo-
geneous one-level suburbs or the culturally isolated fragments
within the city mass inhibit the opportunity to experience or con-
ceptualize the community as a whole. Where the effective experi-
ences of the child represent only a fragment of the whole, he
must by necessity interpret and conceptualize behavior and
values different than his own in the only frame of reference
which he possesses that of Ms own isolated experience. Thus,
the conditions of metropolitan life encourage the progressive in-
dividualization of culture and the fragmentation of the larger
social classes into more explicitly defined and narrow social
layers. 15

It may well be that this narrow limitation of individual ex-
perience has contributed to ideas of conformity and mass society*
When one encounters only those who are like himself in his daily
activities, when movements in time and space are channeled in
comparable environmental grooves, it is easy to understand why
concepts of equality or conformity become accepted. There are
few experiences which deny or threaten alilceness. And the cult
of "togetherness" throws one further inward and away from
even the minute variation of the immediately external world. The
intentionally isolated family resembles those religious and ethnic
groups which have attempted to resist the centrifugal pull of
the larger society by encysting themselves as nearly autonomous
cult-communities. The Amish and other pietistic sects attempted
to preserve the purity of an earlier agrarian culture by dropping
an isolating cultural curtain around their settlements. Such ata-
vistic survivals have little importance except as anthropological

Metropolis in Time and Space j 131

curiosities. But the hard fact remains that the contemporary
American society encourages, if it does not enforce, isolation of
the individual In ever smaller cultural groups. How, one may
ask, can such a conclusion be accepted in the face of the extensive
mobility of the American people and of their daily comings and
goings and of the extensive development of the mass media? Let
us seek the answer in the great corporate superstructures of com-
merce, industry, and government

It is not our purpose to describe the intricacies of these systems
but to emphasize that within, and between them may be found
graded hierarchies of positions carrying greater or lesser prestige
and responsibility. Parallel with these structures are the profes-
sions with their own systems of prestige and internal divisions
which simulate in structure, although not in size, those of in*
dustry and government.

The significant point for us is this: each mrporatton, each
branch of government, each educational institution, each hos-
pital is not only an organization performing some specialized
function in the complicated workings of an industrial society
but is also organized on the basis of a system of graded positions
which carry differential responsibilities, rewards, and prestige.
The system of positions usually preserves considerable stability,
but movement within organization is never ceasing as individuals
are hired, promoted, retired, or resign. The strivings, intrigu^
maneuvers, and struggles which determine one's position within
the hierarchy of the organization also become a significant factor
in the social position which one occupies in the place of residence.
These factors are not mutually exclusive, although position within
the institutional structure reflects mobility achievement more
precisely than does social dimbing within the locality.

The type of training which middle-class parents insist their
children receive in preparation for adult life provides clear evi-
dence that the goals are institutional rather than community
oriented. The least of the expectations is that the new generation
will remain in the same locality as their parents. But in order to
compete successfully, it is an almost essential requirement that

132 : The Heality and the Promise

one receive a college education. Hence the compulsive pressure
of the parents upon the children for success in college prepara-
tion and in the subsequent choice of a college whose name
carries prestige.

To a considerable extent industrial workers have been outside
the middle-class system of individual competitiveness. Labor's
improved status has corne from cooperative action through labor
organization. But the new industrialism requires fewer and
fewer laborers, a fact expressed in the statistics which showed
that in 1957 the proportion of industrial workers declined below
fifty percent of the whole and continues to decline slowly. Increas-
ingly, their children must seek advanced educational training if
they are to find a place for themselves. This conversion to middle-
class behavior has already begun through the growth of suburbs
for workers.

The careful research that is needed to establish the degree
of conformity and the internal dynamics which explain the re-
lationship between the homogeneous suburbs or urban enclaves,
on one hand, and institutional position, on the other, is still lack-
ing. But empirical observation combined with census data on
income and occupation clearly establishes the correlation. Human
society has not yet become an ant hill, but those of comparable oc-
cupation and status seek out residential localities composed of
others like themselves. Religion, ethnic background, and place
of origin are factors which sometimes influence behavior, but
these seem less important than institutional status.

Thus, the regrouping of the internal population of the city
and its outward spread (with the correlative growth of suburbs)
constitutes a cultural reformation based chiefly upon the growth
of institutional complexity. This settlement pattern is much more
an expression of institutional hierarchy than it is of the basis
upon which social class in town-community was formed. The
concomitants of family lineage, hereditary occupation and wealth,
and participation in community ceremonialism no longer have
significant cultural meaning; and the institutional linkages which
once tied class to class have no spatial base upon which to op-

Metropolis in Time and Space : 133

erate. The differences within metropolis are not the sum of spa-
tially discrete residential localities but the projection of the re-
mote superstructures.

Community, in its sense of face-to-face interaction, is no longer
the containment within one locality of the cultural divisions of
social class or of the variety of local groupings religious, eco-
nomic, educational which meet the manifold needs of human
life. In fact community disappears before the linkage of status
based on corporate position and one's participation in the affairs of
place of residence. Under such circumstances there can no longer
be the autonomy nor the wholeness of the town-community.
Metropolis may contain within its boundaries all that constitutes
the concept of community, but the parts have become separated
and isolated. The demand for mobility constricts the sense of time
in depth, and the fragmentation of functions alters the relation
between contained space and the environment. Since the system
does not encourage, nor does it perhaps even permit, continuity
in the generational sense, history in its functional sense disap-
pears. Instead, the institutional needs of the present take pre-
cedence over those of the individual, who must remain constantly
poised for social or spatial mobility. Under such circumstances
deep ties to community can only prove to be restrictive. To
remain settled is to be left behind in the race of life. 16

What within metropolis replaces the sense of time in con-
tinuity that is found in the generational linkage of flesh and
blood, in the tradition of locality and event, and in the communi-
cation from generations of the past to those of the present? In
reality, the great superstructures bridge both time and space, but
in this function they cannot remain community bound. Historical
pageantry may continue to entertain, but the organic linkages
from which the symbols derived their meaning have disappeared.
The new organic linkages are those of the superstructures and
these must operate within the fluidity of the present. With the
loss of history and continuity does there also disappear the sense
of tragedy and sacrifice?

These qualities the sense of history, the meaning of tragedy,

134 : The Reality and the Promise

generational continuity, and community have been character-
istic of every civilization thus far known. In one sense metropolis
is a type of community. Its institutional structure provides con-
tinuity beyond that of family lineage. And there may be no real
reason why tragedy or history are essential elements of personal
or group life. But there does seem to be a real danger in the in~
dividuaHzation of culture, since the communal categories of
evaluation arise from comparable experiences which have their
basis in direct and personal relations with others. 17

7

VALUING IN

CONTEMPORARY AMERICA:

A FAMILY CENTERED

PERSPECTIVE

As one tries to understand the nuclear family in its relation to the
corporate superstructure in American life, one cannot escape the
analogy of organism and environment. To a certain point, that
analogy is useful; while looking at the details of life within a
family situation one senses a background in movement, a subtly
but constantly shifting pattern of social organization in the larger
public world without which the nuclear family could not exist
But beyond that point the analogy may be more confusing than
helpful. In the biological world, gross changes in title physical
environment may be considered as primary causes while struc-
tural or behavioral changes in organisms are secondary effects.
But this mechanistic way of thinking will not do when thinking
about the human family as a social institution. The right way to
say it is this: the nuclear family is the microcosmic aspect of the

136 : The Reality and the Promise

same world of which the corporate superstructure is the macro-
cosmic aspect. Neither is cause, neither effect; each Is as it is only
because of its systemic involvement with the other. 1

If we focus attention directly on the contemporary family,
we recognize straightway that we have encountered a vital center
of American values. But how are we to understand the notor-
iously tricky word values? The word can be used to make fixed
and irrevocable moral judgments, as one might say, "The purpose
of marriage is to preserve the value of monogamy." Our use of
the term, however, is different; we are not concerned with what
forms of action and desire ought to be preserved and what forms
proscribed, but rather with what desires Americans do, in fact,
act upon in the family setting. 2 Hence the gerundive valuing is
used to indicate that our object is to describe a form of behavior.

Ordinarily, of course, the term valuing is used less frequently
than choosing, preferring., selecting, electing, or even opting,
when describing the sorts of things one does while shopping,
getting married, or professing a religion. But the very generality
of the term is its major advantage here. 3 We are seeking to dis-
cover what general pattern underlies some of the most important
aspects of life in which this form of behavior occurs. It is this
pattern, if we can discover it, that we shall call the values of con-
temporary America.

We are, then, in one sense seeking to discover what American
people want from life. But we must, in the process, be very cau-
tious not to substitute tautological verbal formulas for the care-
ful examination of the actual social scene. It is, for example, true
that Americans want to be happy. But there is nothing very pro-
found in Aristotle's proposition that happiness is the good for
Man; the word happiness is simply the most general term in the
language for what people in the general tradition of Western
culture want from life. 4 And thus the statement that the Ameri-
can people want happiness is true but tautological and not at
all Illuminating. 5

The same conclusion must be drawn when it is said that Amer-
icans want justice, truth, and beauty in their lives, or in the popu-

Valuing in Contemporary America s 137

lax equivalent of W. L Thomas* four wishes, that they want love,
fame, fortune, and adventure. 6 And it is true but of little con-
sequence to say that the American people want what people
want. What is instructive we must seek for in the details of par-
ticular lands of behavior within a particular social setting.

Concerning the social setting in which valuing occurs, one
great fact is of overriding importance: the range of choices for
satisfying wants has increased exorbitantly and is still increasing
in an accelerating fashion in America today. It is, indeed, impos-
sible to exaggerate and difficult to apprehend the significance of
this cultural phenomenon. In most times and places the details of
human life have been regulated within narrow limits by the twin
forces of custom and necessity. When, for example, rice is the
available food, people eat rice, and the way of life associated
with a rice-growing and rice-eating culture perseveres. 7 But the
series of technological revolutions of the past two centuries have
attenuated the force of economic necessity, and in so doing
have splintered the customs.

Today when the American housewife enters a supermarket, she
is literally forced to choose among a bewildering variety of
articles of which almost any combination will satisfy the physical
needs of her family and the accepted standards of her social
group. Nor is she driven by any hidden necessity whose recogni-
tion would free her from the illusion of choice. For choice is the
ultimate reality of the situation; the illusion is in the standards
by which choices must be made. She must choose between a half-
dozen brands of bottled milk whose contents would be indistin-
guishable to the most precise chemical analysis. Or she must
select from among the powdered and canned milk products
which provide equivalent calcium and protein at lower cost but
also (for most) less pleasant taste. And she must decide whether
it is better to save a few cents here and apply it to other goods
or to elect the convenience and flavor of the homogenized, pas-
teurized, vitandn-enriched bottled product.

The example is trivial, but the point is profound. The economic
theories of choice behavior based on the concepts of marginal

138 s Hie Realty and the Promise

differentiation and utility simply do not apply here. When the
range of choice has been increased beyond a certain critical point,
the choosing itself cannot be other than arbitrary at the conscious
level, maniptdable at the unconscious level,

A vast qualitative gulf lies between the kind of choosing nearly
all contemporary Americans are forced to do and the kind of
choosing a few fortunate members of an agrarian society were
privileged to do. For the latter, special training in moral standards
and esthetic taste became the central matter in all deliberate
education. Both classical economic theory and the liberal democ-
ratic state assumed the beautifully effective education-for-choos-
ing that was characteristic of English and colonial gentlemen.
Tlie downward extension of schooling was always ideally viewed
as a necessary corollary to the downward extension of the ballot
and economic freedom.

The difference between privileged and mass choosing is not
merely in the opportunity for choice. This difference between
the earlier condition in which a few well-instructed men had op-
portunities for choice and the present condition in which virtually
everyone, instructed or not, can and must select from a variety
of physical and spiritual goods as he wishes certainly exists, and
it certainly poses scone obligations to educators. But the differ-
ence is really minor when compared to a second one: the range
of choices has increased to the point where no one can be said to
choose rationally cm any significant portion of his life style.

Both John Dewey and William James took the forked-road ex-
ample as the basic image of intelligence operating in choices. 8
A str oiler is passing through a pleasant wood, casually aware of
and attentive to the various details of his surroundings. He en-
eountes a fork in the road. The casual interest disappears; he
begins to regard clouds, the dock, distances, and temperature
pot Just for what they are in themselves but for their meaning,
1 tirntls, te^ta^^ifeative of the cms&ftG&ces of the alternatives
! presetted. Having aj^^ traveler then

I chooses one or the other in accordance with his purposes, which
I inducle not only the enjoyment of the present moment but also

Valuing In Gootemporarj America 2 139

the duties and obligations inseparable from Ms deepest concep-
tion of self.

There is more than a touch of anachronism In this quaint pic-
ture. Suppose there are a large number of alternatives rather
than only two; suppose these come every few steps rather than
only once in the course of a stroll Suppose one's purposes, as
both Dewey and James would hold, are themselves reconstructed
in part by each decision made. What then would it mean to be
intelligent in choosing? The immediate, common sense response
is probably the most accurate. It would mean simply to continue
moving without trying to do more than keep a general direction
so that at least one does not double back onto the same trail The
man who tries to apply the techniques of problem-solving at each
decision point is, in effect, electing to stand still, and that, m con-
temporary America, is to die.

Despite its nightmarish quality, the latter picture is probably
closer to the actual quality of choice-making in this day than is
that of Dewey and James. To deny the inner-directed, pragmatic
model of intelligent choosing leaves ns with the picture of men
and women more conscious of the need to continue in motion
than of the direction in which they are going or of the reason for
moving at all. Let us turn now to some of the different kinds of
choices that are made in this movement through life, testing, as
it were, this conception of valuing as behavior. Keeping in mind
the centrality of the housewife in the supermarket as the basic
image for conveying what we mean by valuing, let us turn to the
family itself and then outward to religion, art, and politics.

FAMILY LIFE: ISOLATION BELONGING VERSUS PRIVACY

In our discussion of settlement patterns we obtained an in-
sight into the values associated with family life, The new metro*
politan pattern represents a peculiar form of compromise be-
tween the ultimate isolation of the small family unit and the
sense of belonging which makes that isolation tolerable. This
same kind of compromise also operates within the small family

140 : The Reality and the Promise

itself in respect to the relations of the individuals and generations
that comprise it. What specifically does this mean?

Everyone is well aware of the ideal of a good neighborhood in
suburban communities. It is one in which this compromise has
been worked out to the satisfaction of all concerned and is
maintained by a system of subtle but significant symbols. It is
typically expressed in language like this: "We have a good neigh-
borhood. The people here are very friendly. We visit back and
forth occasionally; we even get together every so often for cock-
tails. But we don't intrude on each other's privacy/'

This is quite obviously a very delicate sort of adjustment to
make, and all the more difficult because of the absence of com-
monly recognized symbols to indicate desire for companionship
or privacy. In some English colleges, so we are told, there are
double doors to the dons' rooms. If only one is shut, it implies that
the person inside is willing to receive visitors. But if the occupant
has "sported the oak," that is, closed the outer door, he has signed
himself off from disturbance. This device, in all probability, did
not come into being simultaneously with the college system but
rather developed slowly in response to that same problem of re-
conciling social intercourse with privacy that the small family in
contemporary society faces.

In the absence of such obvious devices, the individual Ameri-
can family simply must be extra-sensitive to the social cues that
determine the particular symbols of his own neighborhood. We
are flooded with examples, showing more pathos than tragedy, of
neighborhoods and families that failed to make the compromise
work. In the time when Park Forest was a brand new Chicago
suburb, many young couples found their privacy lost in the morn-
ing Kaffeeklatsch, the afternoon invasion by neighbor's children,
and the evening community project. When in desperation a wife
closed her front door and opened her Plato, she may have unwit-
tingly overstepped that narrow line of "unneighborliness" and
found herself ostracized by her environing residents. 9 While this
situation was often quite uncomfortable for a time, in the long
run Park Forest, along with other American neighborhoods large

Valuing in Contemporary America : 141

and small, old and new, did manage to evolve compromises that
worked with fair success. Given enough time and the continu-
ation of present rates of geographical mobility, a nation-wide
system of standardized symbols will probably evolve, and this
will certainly ease the burden of day-to-day adjustments by those
who move in and out of new neighborhoods.

The first level of observation, then, would show the American
seeking a synthesis between the values of friendship and privacy.
But we wish to probe a bit deeper and ask, Privacy for what?
Interaction for what? Is it not true that neighborhood interaction
in America has fundamentally no object outside itself? We recog-
nize, of course, that there are many illustrations of neighbor-
hood projects that are very purposeful in nature; working out
plans for harmony in home decoration, preparing petitions, im-
proving neighborhood facilities, or joining to protect local tran-
quillity against invasions by the corporate world. But these ex-
amples do not vitiate the main thought of our hypothesis. For
even when purposes are quite real, neighborhood projects tend
to be more concerned with process than product, more likely
to be thought about and discussed in terms of the interaction
that occurred than what results were achieved. More impor-
tantly, neighborhood projects seldom touch upon those aspects of
life that reach most deeply into the human spirit. The great
ceremonial occasions of the human cycle birth, puberty, mar-
riage, and death are recognized in neighborhood interaction
but only in the most attenuated and symbolic fashion. The actual
agencies which participate with the family in these ceremonies
are not neighborhood groups but professional functionaries.
Neighborhood friends may prepare a dish or send a wreath, but
the hospital delivers the child and the undertaker buries the body.

To say that neighborhood interaction has no object outside
itself is not to say that it is unimportant The very absence of
obvious utilitarian purpose makes possible the wealth of phatic
communication that is apparently as necessary to human beings
as singing is to mockingbirds* Yet the infinite variety of this form
of human behavior should not blind us to its underlying uni-

142 : The Reality and tBe Promise

fonnity. Around whatever common symbols are available
whether baseball, the weather, the Russians, Sartre's latest play,
the house or yard, children and school, an outbreak of illness,
violations of mores, or any other discourse rambles, while iden-
tity of person and structure of group become established. Jane
who simply has to have her way about things . . . George who
has infinite patience in explaining how to do-it-yourself . . .
Dorothy who is too good for her own good . . . Alice who shirks
her neighborhood responsibilities while trying to get ahead in
the next higher social group . . . and so on. The neighborhood
system permits almost infinite variety of personal idiosyncrasy
because it has few utilitarian functions to which individuality
must be subordinated.

These few utilitarian functions are well known, for certain
forms of behavior threaten the welfare of the neighborhood
group, and these must be made known to newcomers early*
They include failure to maintain the external appearance of
one's property in accordance with the neighborhood's standard
of decency, failure to repress vandalism in children, entertaining
in kind and amount that disturbs neighbors, and the like. A
newcomer to a neighborhood needs no explicit warnings when he
hears the history of the Smiths "who were really never happy
here. She would insist upon sunbathing in the front yard, he
let that house go unpainted, and those kids, well . . ?

There appear to be some differences between Jewish and
Protestant neighborhood behavior. The pattern we described
above is typical of the Protestant suburban way, which depends
in the main upon the individual conscience to apprehend the
true light and follow it In economically comparable Jewish
neighborhoods, there seems to be somewhat more explicitness
about the Law of the Neighborhood, which helps considerably
on the points that it covers, as for example, just how often you
should repaint your house. But when a contingency that has not
been taken into account arises, the difficulties become greater.
For instance, in a not-too-wealthy neighborhood, just how much
affluence does one have to achieve before he is entitled to build

Valuing In Contemporary America : 143

a private swimming pool? Should lie move out of the neighbor-
hood if lie is determined to have one although none is to be found
on surrounding properties? It requires considerable ingenuity
and even more good will to keep the Law up-to-date.

The functions and values of neighborhood interaction are open
to observation, and thus their description is relatively simple.
Interaction expresses personality and in so doing establishes a
group that supports the personalities of its members. It regulates
certain relatively superficial aspects of personal behavior. But
when we attempt to look inside the small family itself, we are
suddenly met by an opaque screen. Privacy is well-nigh invio-
lable, and when we ask, Privacy for what? we find the question
difficult to answer. Clues are available as to what goes into the
home. We notice from the fluctuations in the do-it-yourself
industry that this form of family action has moved from hobbies
to essentials, from luxuries to currently defined necessities. Tele-
vision fare seems to follow certain predictable fashions. Vogues
in home furnishings and decorations as well as in the mythology
of child rearing can easily be traced.

But what values are being sought and what values have been
achieved behind the fa9ade of the home? Because we do not
know, we are likely to say that privacy is sought purely for the
sake of privacy, and that while the wall between the neighbor-
hood and the snail family is erected to secure privacy for the
family, the continual struggle within the family is to secure
privacy for the individual person. There is certain evidence to
support this hypothesis, as in the ideal of one bedroom, and more
strikingly one bathroom, per person. A best seller by Robert Paul
Smith, Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing.
made a convincing as weH as amusing case for the thesis that
the major problem of the relation of generations is to be found
in tiheir lack of privacy from each other. Tom Sawyer and Penrod
had a defensible privacy from adults that Mr. Smith sees as re-
grettably disappearing.

On the other hand, it may well be that the companionate
family, as defined by Burgess and Locke, is in search of a deeper

144 : The Reality and the Promise

and richer form of human association than can be found in neigh-
borhood or peer group relations. 10 The thesis of this chapter is
that a blind necessity to keep moving is the most obvious fact
about all contemporary valuing behavior. The pattern described
for neighborhood interaction is admirably designed to facilitate
rapid and unfettered movement. It is a pattern of relations that
cornes to dominate friendships that are not distinctly neighbor-
hood in location. But all this leaves out that form of human as-
sociation which penetrates to the roots of personality and over-
comes the loneliness which so often occurs in a crowd. This deeper
land of relation we must call by its right name: love. For persons
on the move and moving in small family units, other relations
necessarily remain tenuous and easily broken; love must
be found, if at all, within the small family. And we know, both
intuitively and on sound psychological evidence, that without love
the human spirit simply cannot survive. 11

But what sort of love? Not the brotherly love of the Greeks,
the charity of Christianity, nor the romantic passion of every
generation's youth. The apotheosis of brotherly love is in the
sacrifice of self for the other, of Christian charity in Christ's
sacrifice for all humanity, of romantic love as in Romeo and
Juliet, Dante and Beatrice, Rudolfo and Mimi in the parting
(whether by death or social convention) of the lovers, which
is the only suitable denouement of the problem set by the at-
tachment itself.

But in the modern nuclear family none of these models is ap-
propriate. Love is not considered a relation in which one loses
or even transforms self; rather it is a support to the search for
self-fulfillment. There is no parting save the anticlimactic sepa-
ration by the long-delayed death of one (usually the male)
partner. It is the relation most peculiarly tied to the profound
wells of human selfhood in contemporary America* But it is
unsung, indeed unsingable, in our literature. The nuclear family
has no universal symbols; rather each family must painfully
establish its own identity by and with things, a practice fostered
by misleadingly named commimity property laws.

Valuing in Contemporary America : 145

The things a family accumulates, as one very astute set of
observers has pointed out, become a part of its identity more
deeply than the house which the family so tenuously owns. "It
is really the movables which create the air of homeliness, and
which are psychologically immovable, rather than the physically
rooted house which is there to be moved into, grown into, moved
out of and left behind an outmoded shell to be reoccupied by
another mobile family." 12

The small family, then, is required to support the deepest sort
of human relation, to accomplish within itself what the agrarian
society was able to spread out over an entire community. An
extended family system and peer relations that persevered for
a lifetime allowed love to be extended and received in various
amounts and in various modes, all of which are now con-
centrated in the small family. Togetherness, recently and sig-
nificantly banned from the cover of McCdfTs Magazine, becomes
a potentially explosive force. In fact the truly amazing thing
in historical and anthropological perspective is that the system
works at all. But work it does, even the divorce rate having hit
some relatively stable plateau, meaning in effect that it simply
takes a certain amount of trial and error to get the particular
people together who can manage this potently destructive system
of relations.

Changes in dating and courtship patterns indicate a growing
seriousness on the part of adolescents as they face the prospects
of marriage. The constantly improving art of marriage coun-
seling helps to minimize the number of initial mistakes in under-
taking family living and to relieve the tragedy of failures when
they occur. These counselors have come to recognize the mar-
velously functional value in our apparently chaotic system of
dating and courtship. The response of the heart may be the best
evidence a young man or woman can find for deciding whether
to lode a lifetime into one orbit or another. For the old saying
about "marrying and settling down** no longer applies. One's
lifetime is still in motion, only now its motion is linked with that
of another, a condition that must produce strains and stresses*

146 : The Reality and the Promise

For in the final analysis the culture requires that the man and
the woman and the children constituting a family shut the
doors of their house or apartment, to face each other day after
day, either to love or to perish.

Measured against the traditions of the human race, the small
family pattern of contemporary suburban America represents a
genuine transvaluation of values. For although the relations be-
tween concrete individuals were always less than completely
predictable and culturally determined, they were nevertheless
supported within a larger system of relations that provided
stability and predictability not directly found in the personal
interaction itself. The larger system provided support for the
exigencies of interpersonal intercourse in the very concrete sense
that individuals who found difficulty in one relationship were
able to find reinforcing expectations, social control, and personal
solace through a wide range of other relationships. Studies rang-
ing from Chinese village life to American peer culture reveal the
universality of this social phenomenon. 13 But given the psy-
chological necessity for movement, both geographically and
socially, and for the acceptance of the outward movement of
others, the contemporary American man, woman, and child must
find within the small family itself the social control and personal
solace necessary for human existence. The values formerly given
with membership in a larger group now become the values sought
for in the small family itself. This is the transvaluation. It is
illustrated in the attention of employers to personal relations
among employees, and more dramatically, in the changing sys-
tems of interaction during courtship. Only a few years ago, young
men and women relied upon the stability of their peer group
status and participation in its broader sense in the affairs of the
camgamfty to relieve the strain of interpersonal relations with
potential marriage partners. Today just the opposite seems to
obtain: within the stability of the relation of the "steady date/*
young people find a basis for adjusting to a rapidly and un-
predictably changing larger social system. 14

Valuing in Contemporary America : 147

CHUBCH ACTIVITY: AN EMOTIONAL ADJUNCT

Very many explanations liave been offered for the current
resurgence of interest in religion and the growth in church mem-
bership in the United States, which for lack of time and space
cannot be considered here. But in the points made above con-
cerning the problem of small family life in America, there may
be a definite clue for the so-called revival of religion. For like
the small family, the church has no essential relation to the
community in which it is found. It does not collect the taxes, nor
dispose of the sewage and garbage, nor protect property and
person, nor provide light and heat, nor even take care of the
community's obligations for benevolent, philanthropic care.
These tasks have become, as they had to become, the domain of
professional functionaries. Well, then, what does the church do?
Madison Avenue has given us a clue in the doggerel cliche:
"The family that prays together stays together!"

The behavior required in the actual church service seems to
bear an isomorphic resemblance to behavior in the small family.
One can move from community to community and still find in
the church or synagogue of his (euphemistically labeled) choice
the same rituals, the familiar, self -enhancing, and supporting
activities. And church behavior can and does go on out of any
relation, either to the details of the particular community in
which it is found, or more importantly, to the intellectual con-
tent of the religious beliefs. Sophisticated morals and taste are
shocked by the overtones of primitive cannibalism in the symbolic
act of the Sacrament of Communion and by the ethically repul-
sive doctrines of the Covenant and the Atonement. None of this
matters essentially, however, for no one attends to the doctrines.
The visual and auditory sensations of the service itself, the elan
of the shared activity, are taken by the communicant of whatever
faith essentially at their surface value, without attention to the
content of the symbols.

As we might expect, the "message** of the contemporary church
in the United States Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish says this:

148 : The Reality and tlie Promise

"The relation of love which you seek so desperately in your
personal life is supported by the basic structure of the world.
Do justice, walk humbly with thy God, seek with a contrite
heart, and you will find that the relation you must establish can
be established." It is a message that can be apprehended in the
privacy of the individual and shared within the small family
circle, without giving any hostages to the local community that
would complicate the ever present necessity to be on the move.
But the words of this credo have to be specifically set within
the context of the rituals, perhaps better, within the behavior of
the church itself; hence the emphasis on specificity in church
dogma that is characteristic of contemporary society. The move-
ment toward union of community churches devoid of specific
doctrine has been arrested if not definitely turned back. For the
message mentioned above simply cannot be personally incor-
porated within the abstract language of rational science or
philosophy. Technically it is an attitude rather than a belief, and
we are well aware that attitudes are formed by participation,
not by argument. But cast in language that pervades the be-
havior and emotional participation of the church itself, the
message becomes personally significant. That he can find in his
church support for the love he must establish in his mobile
family is at least (or perhaps, at most) the hope of the church
communicant. How effective churches are in the support of love
in families is difficult to determine. Though there is some evi-
dence that community of religious persuasion is correlated sig-
nificantly with family stability, interpretation of this evidence
allows a great deal of latitude. There may well be some more
obscure third factor. But the obvious signs of church member-
ship, the official adoption of religious motifs in national symbols,
the increasing attractiveness of theology in nonreligious studies,
and the apparent rise in the quality of church functionaries all
point to a kind of faith that the church communion is essential
to the system of values in American life. And the analysis above,
if correct, would center this faith in the dominant locus of valuing
behavior, namely the mobile small family.

Valuing in Contemporary America s 149

It is necessary to try to comprehend the significance of non-
ritualistic forms of association that often center around church
activities. These follow without any serious modification the
pattern and function of neighborhood interaction we have de-
scribed. The church merely serves as a convenient locus and
occasion for interaction which could occur just as well, and
perhaps a bit more convivially, elsewhere. And yet is this the
entire picture? Isn't one's church membership possibly a sur-
rogate for feelings of blood, for extended kinship, for traditions
that transcend generations, for a sense of belonging to the saved
and of separateness from the damned in short a surrogate for
all those exclusive feelings which are rightly regarded as in-
appropriate in the great corporate world of metropolis? One
hesitates to answer affirmatively, for surely American churches
have finally learned to oppose the destructive particularisms of
race and nationality. But have they learned to oppose all de-
structive particularisms? Is any binding and constructive par-
ticularism between nuclear family and corporate outer world
really possible? The churches of America have not yet found
an answer.

Will Herberg says that Americans understand the question,
**What are you?" as asking for one's religious affiliation. Cer-
tainly it can carry that meaning. 15 And if, as we have been
arguing, the burden of Americans is to keep forever asking
**Who am I and what shall I become?" then the association
within the church is at least a starting point; here one is for the
moment sure of what he now is.

Despite the inevitable tendency of church groups to separate
along socio-economic lines and, in turn, to transform the mosaic
of metropolitan settlement into a religious design, still the church
is not a distinctively community agency. In ever more formalized
corporate structures, the churches represent associations that
divide the nation but could in principle unite the world. The
search for privacy and relatedness in the church is subtly dif-
ferent from what it is elsewhere. And thus the family strives to

150 : The Reality and the Promise

assure identity to its children by giving them their names while
enrolling them in a church.

THE ESTHETIC VALUES: MASS ABT AND PRIVATE SYMBOLS

When we turn to the question of the values sought for and
achieved through activities related to one or more of the art
forms in contemporary society, our thesis that the necessity to
be on the move is the key fact for understanding typical modes
of valuing seems to break down completely. Now it would be
easy, and superficially correct, to point out that some particular
level of taste is associated with a particular life-style, that as
families change life-style and this involves changing neighbor-
hood, forms of inter-family association, and often church affilia-
tion they are also expected to change taste in the arts, to acquire
new symbols for the public communication of their neighborhood-
type association. Thus in one social group it is quite proper in
the course of conversation to mention an article in the Reader's
Digest. In other groups this would mark one immediately as out-
side the pale. Selection of television shows, choice in music,
pictures on the walls, furniture, and the various objects possessed
by a family can all be rated on some scale of taste; and a family
that is moving may find itself faced with the necessity to spend
money and to part with comfortable possessions in order to meet
the demands of a new life-style, whether the move is geographical
or social. The valuing of objects, like the valuing of other human
beings in neighborhood interaction, has to be at that psychic dis-
tance which enables the dissolution of the relation to take place
without serious stress on personality. Hence the superficiality of
taste in America, the hypocrisy of expressed judgments, and the
other indictments of Americans* relations to their arts. 16

Still, when we look at the situation in the arts we must ask
whether those values traditionally conceived as being distinctive
to esthetic activities are changing their significance in the con-
temporary social scene.

It used to be good fun to identify Communists and fellow

Valuing In Contemporary America : 151

travelers by their judgments of the arts. Experts at the game
would refrain from the obvious questions, such as asking for a
relative ranking of Hemingway and Howard Fast. Rather, de-
pending upon the interest and sophistication of the respondent,
they might mention the architectural merits of the Brooklyn
Bridge and the Eiffel Tower (the first is beautiful, the second
stinks), Tintoretto versus Raphael as painters, respectively
powerful and effete, and so on through media and periods. No
single answer determined the issue; pattern and consistency were
the telltale symptoms. Genuine cognoscenti were seldom sur-
prised by the judgments that they made and verified by turning
to such topics as an interpretation of the Spanish Civil War.

But all that was long ago. It was a reflection of an anachronis-
tic and as you wish, amusing, pathetic, or infuriating whole-
ness in value judgments. The separation of esthetic values from
moral and political values in a total society is a recent, perhaps
unique phenomenon. If we may judge from Plato's violence in
rejecting it, ars gratia artis was an ancient doctrine before
Latin was a civilized tongue. But its ancient, or medieval, or
even nineteenth century adherents were always a small minority
sitting atop a folk society in which the arts were integral with
the rest of life, in which the standards of esthetic taste and
moral worth were indistinguishable to those who used them.
The pre-Korean left-winger was, as he would have wished to be,
much closer to the "natural" tendency of human beings in all
times and places than were his tormentors, 17

The dominating fact of contemporary society, however, is that
these judgments are now quite distinct for the masses as well
as for the literati Most of those who deplore, applaud, or apolo-
gize for the mass arts seem to miss the crucial significance of
the fact that when the masses revolted they seized, among other
things, tihe right to make esthetic judgments on bases that are
quite separate from utilitarian effectiveness, political expediency
(Plato), moral worth, or any other basis whatsoever. Far from
being cynical, it was a remarkably accurate stroke to make
ars gratia artis the motto of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Whatever

152 : The Reality and the Promise

may have been Sam Goldwyn's personal motivation in producing
Ms films, the general public accepted or rejected his offerings
on one, purely esthetic, criterion: whether or not they enjoyed
them.

This is not to say that enjoyment is the only esthetic criterion
that could or should be applied to motion pictures. It is only
to say that, save in a truly insignificant proportion of cases,
people do not attend movies to make money, save their souls,
gain political advantage, appease the gods, or reinforce a sense
of community. For these purposes one might go to work, to
church, or to lodge meeting. But one goes to the movies in
order to give attention to a work of art for the purpose of
enjoying it At least in this residual sense the criterion applied to
movies is a purely esthetic one. (One genuine exception to this
will be found in those who attend the movies in order to engage
in the non-consummatory love making that is central to the
American courtship system. But even so, the number of passive
observers is still overwhelmingly greater than the number of
active participants.)

What has been said of the movies applies a fortiori to the
other forms of mass art. And on the next point, we have to accept
the verdict of the viewers-with-alarai: in contemporary American
society, there can be no permanent separation of mass art from
high art. The efforts of the avant-garde to get ahead are matched
by the efforts of the masses to catch up. Dance sequences in
musicals, whether on Broadway, the movies, or television, owe
more to Diaghilev and Isadora Duncan than they do to the
significantly named "production numbers* of Florenz Ziegfeld
and George M. Cohan. Poems used as fillers in the Saturday
Evening Post have more than traces of Edgar A. Guest, but the
patterns of Poetry are penetrating, and Ogden Nash is already
there, waiting. The distortedly long legs found in calendar art
may not owe their direct inspiration to Picasso, but somehow
people learned not to expect photographic accuracy in paintings,
even in those done with an airbrush. The picture window in
every split-level home owes a debt to the Bauhaus. In however

Valuing in Contemporary America s 153

degenerate form, Detroit each year pays tribute to Moholy-
Nagy. And so on through all the popular arts and art objects,
Whether one judges it as advance in mass art or loss of creativity
in high art, the fart remains that the gap between is very diffi-
cult to maintain.' 1 - 8

There is, admittedly, a possibly alarming aspect to the march-
ing together of mass art and high art If we deine mass art as
aH those objects or activities produced specifically to provide
enjoyment for large numbers of people, high art becomes that
which is produced to satisfy canons that transcend but do not
exclude enjoyment For high art must be enjoyable, at least to
some, before it can be art at all.

It is, moreover, difficult for the serious artist to avoid such
hazards as isolation from his audience^ involvement in the caltisin
of a select circle, and over-attention to uneducated taste. The
standards that enable high art continually to enliven mass art
are undoubtedly difficult to maintain in the face of the pres-
sure and the aH-encompassing demand of mass art for the
immediately enjoyable. There are those who claim that we are
still reaping the benefits in mass art of developments that oc-
curred several decades previously in high art, benefits that will
cease as soon as the wells dry up. But one is led to doubt the
immediacy of the threat as one observes the vitality and dedica-
tion of college and university departments devoted to the various
arts. If some posturing is to be found there occasionally, there
is also the protection necessary to create new forms. And if
what is true of college and university finds its echoes in other
enclaves within the total society, it is not fatal that all high art
is under constant pressure to become mass art and give up all
criteria other than pleasing mass taste. The pressure will over-
come some (Erskjfoe Caldwdl), it will drive others to self-
stultifying extremes of eccentricity, but a sufficient number will
survive to provide the nucleus for the constant reenrichment of
mass art

(The analogy between the basic and applied sciences and
the high and mass arts is obvious. The best reply to those who

154 : The Reality and the Promise

claim that industries are using up basic scientific knowledge
without replenishing the store is to point to the well-known fact
that more basic research is now being carried on in industrial
laboratories than in all colleges and universities a generation
ago. Insofar as they are not doing so now, distributors of the mass
arts might do well to take a leaf from the same book. Colleges
and universities are perhaps not the only places in which to
nourish the rare spirits who will add new techniques and
stimulate jaded appetites for the mass arts.)

The problem of the high arts is, however, not our concern. The
major fact we have to contend with is that the esthetic goods
of life are now for all Americans what they once were for only a
small elite; that is, available without let or hindrance, to be
chosen in supermarket-fashion as one finds enjoyment in the
choosing and appropriating. This seems much more fundamental
than the relatively obvious relation of taste to social class. The
cobbler who likes opera, the professor of English who reads
comic books these are much more the current symbols of the
status of the arts in America than is the pathetically affected dis-
course of the Literary Society in Main Street. 19 For a minority,
designated the Upper Bohemians by Russell Lynes, participation
in the high arts is definitive of a life-style; but for most Ameri-
cans, for those who spend more money on concerts than on
baseball and more on recordings of serious music than on
either, the arts high or low stand outside the major deter-
minants of social position. 20

It is in this context that our original thesis concerning the
necessity for mobility has to be tested. And put to the test, it
offers little explanation for the phenomena mentioned here.
Perhaps the tremendous range of available choices and the wide
limits of social acceptability for choosing make it possible for
individual families to develop some bases for love and companion-
ship that center around participation in the arts. But this is pure
speculation for which no evidence is offered. Is it really the case
that watching television, listening to the hi-fi, or reading the same
books form a basis for establishing love within the small family?

Valuing in Contemporary America 5 155

What is the typical mode of interaction while engaging in these
activities jointly? Is entertainment as found in whatever art
form an effective means for shielding the different ages and
sexes within the small family from irritating contact with each
other? These are questions for research that are suggested by
the overall analysis, but they cannot be answered by abstract
speculation.

This much, however, is clear. Hie individual family need not
relinquish its privacy while securing the richness and fullness of
the arts; they come to the family through the good offices of the
corporate system. Today when one asks about the meaning of
the arts in American life, he is asking about one of two things:
What do the great corporate superstructures of American society
do to, and for, the arts (and vice versa)? And what do the arts
do in the lives of individuals? In the struggle of families to find
a bearable balance between privacy and belonging in local com-
munities, the arts, seem to make no contribution. We must later in-
quire whether they have actually no contribution to make.

THE POLITICAL VALUES OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AS
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS RICHLY, WIDELY, DEEPLY EXTENDED

American culture is blessed with a magnificent range of sym-
bolic values extending back in time, outwardly wide in applica-
tion, inwardly deep in conscience. The distinctively American
documents expressive of our values are built upon literally mil-
lennia of progress in refining values the Hellenic conceptions
of virtue in man and polis, the Roman conception of impartial
justice under law, the Judaic feeling for the brotherhood of
man tinder the fatherhood of God, the Christian ideals of charity
and love, the medieval search for peace and order all of these
are preserved and caught up in the definitely political progenitors
of our Declaration of Independence, Preamble to the Constitu-
tion, Gettysburg Address, Fourteen Points, Fair Deal, and now
a New Frontier, In history there are no absolute beginnings, but
there can be disastrous endings. Fortunately, the American

156 j The Reality and the Promise

system of symbolic values is tied neither to a beginning nor to
an end but is as cumulative as the steady progress in mathemat-
ics.

The importance of this can be grasped only by seeing it in
contrast to the system of values of western Europe. Since the
eighteenth century a transvaluation of European political values
has been taking place; that is to say, those values that stood
uppermost in the symbolic systems prior to that time have been
deliberately devalued and other values substituted in their place.
In actuality this is probably a continuous process, but certain
cataclysmic events can be pointed* to by way of illustration.
The first was the French Revolution. Whatever values came to
be associated with the antien regime were regarded by the
revolutionists in France as the antitheses of real ones. Local and
religious loyalties were attacked deliberately and as nearly as
possible wiped out. In other European nations the revolutionary
movements of the first half of the nineteenth century were also,
almost without exception, carried forward under banners that
repudiated the traditional symbols of value of the previous eras.
But the nihilistic aspects of the French Revolution gained a
strong foothold neither in this country nor in England. A second
event, however, did have repercussions in England, namely the
appearance of revolutionary socialism or Marxist communism.
The main tenet of Marxism, so far as symbolic value systems are
concerned, is that all the symbolic values of a bourgeois society
are merely tools for the psychic manipulation of the proletariat,
A person who comes to feel that his respect for patriotism,
honesty, and compromise is in actuality a tool in the hands of his
enemies can experience this transvaluation of values in an in-
tensely personal sense. And if, when the lines are drawn, he
still inarches with his nation rather than with his class, he no
longer does so out of motives that he can defend to Ms own
intellect but rather out of deep, irrational urges. This is what
took place in the third event, with the appearance of fascism.
Symbolic value systems sprang tip that were not only contrary
to the traditional values of western Europe, but out of all his-

Valuing in Contemporary America : 157

toxical or continuous relation to them. The symbols of church,
science, humanism, democracy, and progress were distorted out
of all recognition in the Fascist ideology. The major problem of
reconstruction facing western Europe even today is essentially
that of revivifying its traditional political symbols.

But the United States by and large felt only the most remote
tremors from these European cataclysms. On the contrary, the
dominant value symbols were strengthened by the challenges
they faced in this country, specifically the challenge of being
ingested by a continuing press of new immigrants. For although
there seems to be a limited life span to symbolic values, how-
ever long the extrinsic form of the symbol survives, those of the
United States escaped extinction by being continuously renewed
in the process of becoming the symbolic values of new Ameri-
cans. Hyman Kaplan was made a bigger and better man by the
Gettysburg Address, but the Gettysburg Address was given a
new meaning and a fresh significance through the mind and
spirit of Hyman Kaplan. 21 Thus the American political symbols
were not only extended but also rejuvenated.

If a long enough time span is considered, the outward ex-
tension in application is also seen as a linear curve. We have
yet to accord to the once heathen, now Communist, Chinese
truly full equality to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
in whatever form they wish to pursue it; but we have also
moved a long way from those ambiguous words in the Constitu-
tion that speak of "other persons'* as being only partly entitled
to the full protection of the law. Women, children, aliens,
Tndfans 3 Negroes, and now the mentally ill have gradually been
incorporated into the body of all men to whom are due certain
goods that society has to offer. And as with time the available
goods have increased in scope, so too has the meaning of the
rights. Society can no longer offer the right to suffer, starve,
and perhaps succeed on the geographical frontier, but it can
and does offer freedom from starvation to those no longer able
to work productively. The application of the value system has

158 : The Reality and the Promise

thus been expanded to more people and extended to a more
inclusive conception of our society's goods.

The extension inward into private conscience is indicated by
the public statements of political leaders who seem compelled
by inward motives to couch the most obvious matters of ex-
pediency in the ceremonial language of our symbolic values. This
behavior, particularly noticeable in President Eisenhower, was
frequently criticized as being hypocritical; but a more reasonable
interpretation would be that Eisenhower, like other Americans,
has so deeply internalized these symbols that they have become
the natural vehicle for expressing anything whatsoever. More
revealing indications of this phenomenon may be found in the
advertising and public relations industries. It seems impossible
for many of these highly literate and articulate men and women
to take their job at face value, as simply a kind of activity that
is rather highly rewarded in the economic system. In private
conversation and in public utterance they display the most
curious ambivalence. Privately they pay the most reverent
homage to the symbolic values by the direct flouting of them,
for there seems to be a compulsion on their part to assert (i)
"We do not, we cannot contribute anything to the general wel-
fare, to the promotion of happiness in its best sense among men,"
and (2) "We are therefore the most abominable of creatures."
At the same time in public utterances, spokesmen for these in-
dustries attach their activities as directly as possible to the
dominant value symbols. Such behavior could not reasonably be
interpreted as a purely cold and calculating pursuit of power
and fortune. It seems rather to be a kind of ambivalence that
we should expect from a group directly concerned with sym-
bolic action having no obvious congruence with dominant value
symbols of the culture. Production men, who are concerned with
tilings other than symbols, do not seem to require so desperately
to be identified with the political symbols of our nation.

The situation of the profession of education, another occupa-
tion that is predominantly symbolic, is in a way precisely the
opposite of the advertising profession. Educators have already

Valuing in Contemporary America : 159

identified their function with the dominant political symbols.
Schools are readily associated with the preservation of democ-
racy, with maximizing the potentialities of each individual, with
the establishment of socially useful habits and skills, etc,, all
of which obviously and directly connect with the symbols of the
great historical documents expressive of national ideals. And in
turn educators become afflicted with uneasy consciences "Because
their work is so closely tied to the dominant value system. The
language of moral imperative becomes the natural speech of
educators, and every discrepancy between the ideals of this lan-
guage and the often grubby facts of educational practice be-
comes a personal affront to the conscience of educators. 22 Here
again, we find that among those who deal directly in symbols,
the inward extension of symbolic values to private conscience
is an observable phenomenon.

It is quite easy to see that in America an ever larger propor-
tion of men and women work not with material things but with
symbols. And whether as workers in the so-called media in-
dustries or as jealously individual poets, those who have suc-
ceeded in escaping traditional cliches of language and thought
display a frighteningly articulate objectivity toward every aspect
of their world. Cynicism, nihilism, withdrawal, and despair are
not unknown among those who have most clearly succeeded in
the largely verbal education they have received. But when we
examine the meaning of this disaffection among those who live
by words, we must recognize title complete absence of any for-
mulated alternatives to the long tradition of symbolic values that
represent America. Disaffection is a personal, not a social or
political phenomenon, and this is in many ways unfortunate, for
our tradition of symbolic values has been kept vital and growing
because of the constant enrichment of criticism. But this same
phenomenon also is evidence that the symbolic values of America
have extended so deeply into the American consciousness that
even the disillusioned intellectual cannot seriously conceive of
an alternative, however personally alienated he may find himself
from the social system that is supposed to express those values.

160 : The Reality and the Promise

Let us now look, superficially though it must be, at the sub-
stance of American value symbols. The fact that they cluster
largely around the state as an institution is no mere accident.
This is to be expected in the light of American history, especially
that portion of our history in which primary commitments to
the nation, its establishment and its preservation, gave the
dramatic tone and the emotive meaning to our national symbols.
Our national heroes are almost without exception men of state.
Americans have had no authentic geniuses in the field of religion;
the nearest candidates Mary Baker Eddy and Brigham Young
were primarily geniuses of organization, not prophets of deep
spiritual insight They were religious statesmen.

But there is a curious balance in the United States between
loyalty to the state as such and loyalty to symbols that are non-
state in origin and meaning. While the symbols cluster around
the state, they are not symbols-of -state. Thus the vaunted free-
doms from state coercion center, by definition, on a relation of
the individual to his state but not on a subordination of the
individual to his nation-state, much less on a subordination of
the individual to any existing government. This balance (it might
be called more accurately an extremely dangerous 'tension) is
seriously threatened in the transition to industrial society. The
facts and our interpretation of them carry us to two opposing
hypotheses. The question is whether American civilization can
retain the flexibility which has carried us through many im-
mediate crises as well as a long-term revolution from agrarian
to industrial-scientific culture; or whether the process of rigidi-
fying is not so far advanced that we will attempt to retain all
we now hold (for fear of losing any part of it) and by so doing,
lose all. Let there be no illusion that conquest of space and un-
raveling the mystery of the universe can substitute for a value
system firmly grounded in the living, hence changing, reality of
American life. Such events, when they come and however mar-
velous they may be, will constitute only spectaculars, not the
realization of man or of the promise of America.

Which of the two hypotheses will be actualized depends upon

Valuing in Contemporary America : 161

future events about which we can now do no better than offer
speculations. The answer to this question lies within the relation
between the individual and the state and, by extension, to the
other great superstractures. If this relationship is not direct and
vital and close to actual valuing, then the dream remains unful-
filled. It is for this reason that the clues offered us by religion and
esthetics are of such prime importance, since a church serves as
a place of common assembly for families from the neighborhoods,
and art symbols, whether experienced publicly or privately, ul-
timately remain completely individual in their impact

How then may we interpret the current urge to blend religious
with secular symbols, particularly political symbols? Should we
view this as an attempt to restore faith and appeal in the po-
litical symbols? Or should we accept such intermingling as evi-
dence of religious weakness and an effort to make secure the only
local institution (except for the school and hospital, which are
special cases ) that gives support to the family in its isolation and
privacy? On this interpretation, religion has found a place for
itself within industrial society and has withdrawn its challenge
to nation and rational science. It makes no pretense to resolve
the tension between individual and superstructure and may
actually counsel withdrawal and thus repeat the solution offered
before Christ by separatist Jews, by primitive Christianity, and
by pietistic Protestant sects. Such a procedure might shatter
Western civilization by erosion from within; it cannot solve the
human problems produced by it.

The situation for esthetic valuing seems a little dearer, al-
though the answer we derive should heighten our apprehensions.
If the individual no longer possesses the capacity to respond to
art forms with a wholeness of value judgments, an inability
partly produced by the separation of esthetic from moral and
political values, the artist now also lacks the capacity to evoke
symbols which either express the whole or represent a congruent
part thereof. Thomas Wolfe agonizingly sought to comprehend
the whole but was ultimately shattered by his own compulsions
and fell back upon reporting endless minutiae, hoping the im-

162 : The Reality and the Promise

mensity of the volume might somehow compensate for his failure.
The contemporary artist no longer even struggles toward such
conceptions. He has taken his stand firmly inside his own psyche
and whatever emerges he takes for the expression he has sought.
Unfortunately, high art both rejects and distorts the linkage of
the individual with his total society by insisting in its symbolism
that only the personal is real. It may well be that we shall have
no more Faulkners, Lewises, or Marquands, not alone because
the world they reported upon is gone, but because the frag-
mented vignettes of Mailer and Salinger represent the only visible
reality. In such literary works we find Pilgrims but no Progress,
only aimless wandering. 23

IPolitical values are paradigms for behavior in the public world.
But whether they are achieved or not is determined not only by
events in the public world but also by the subtle nuances of
interpersonal relations in the millions of families that comprise
this nation. As the political scene shifts into foreground, the
family becomes an all-pervading background. We have yet to
produce a literary vision portraying the American and his con-
stant interplay between these two worlds.

8

SCIENCE

AND
SELF-FULFILLMENT

Many factors have contributed to the formation of contemporary
America, Its abundant resources, energetic people, democratic
institutions, and pragmatic beliefs have all been mixed in the
crucible of history to produce a unique civilization.

No other nation can match this country's high level of material
prosperity, and only a few equal the orderliness with which its
citizens meet the daily tasks of keeping fed, clothed, and housed,
while at the same time, applying an immense amount of energy
to its social, political, and economic machinery. No nation and
no civilization has ever granted to so many freedom from the
demands of the labor market, so they could spend their youth
in preparation for life's tasks and their old age with assurance
of security. No other nation has ever shared its knowledge and
means so generously with others and asked so little in return.

164 : The Reality and the Promise

But if security, power, and glory have been the reward, they
have not been achieved without a cost.

The cost with which we are concerned cannot be measured
in the statistics of trade balances or production units, nor counted
in the heavy requirements of civic duty, family responsibility,
or fob performance. No, the cost must be related to intangible
human values intricately interwoven in the concept of self, and
through self to the purpose and meaning of life and the universe.
The price is paid in the currency of self-consciousness.

AMEBICAN CIVILIZATION ANB SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

The consciousness of the contemporary American is sharply
marked off from other historically significant concepts of self-
hood, 1 as the Hindu's effort to lose himself in contemplation^
the medieval Christian's renunciation of self-will in order to
achieve a higher selfhood through grace, and the Chinese Com-
munist's identification of selfhood with the commune and its
idealized concept of material production. Like these others, the
American's consciousness is determined by a world view acquired
in total innocence during the process of growing up, but unlike
these others it gives him neither afterlife nor collectivity in
which to overcome his finitude, sin, and anxiety. It puts upon
him the onus of self-fulfillment within a world that can offer
only change itself as the touchstone of enduring reality. To
grasp the full impact of such a consciousness of self is to under-
stand the extraordinary burden our civilization puts on each
individual.

In his compelling (and surprisingly successful) play /. B^
Archibald MacLeish chose the Biblical character Job as the proto-
type of modern man. 2 In some ways the choice was fortunate, for
Job clearly exemplifies the American's sense of individual re-
sponsibility for the pubMc weal. J. B. prospers in the objective
public sense as he carries out his duties to his fellow men.

But at least until the penultimate scene of the play, J. B. is
not an adequate exemplar of the American's consciousness. For

Science and SeH-FdfiHment : 165

J. B. is a terribly dull person and seems to feel no obligation to
become anytlaing eke, whereas for the contemporary American
things are otherwise. His responsibilities to the external world
do not preempt his whole life; in fact they are ordinarily sub-
ordinate to Ms obligation to fulfill himself: to ever grow, develop,
and utilize Ms potentialities. Yet though this obligation is a chal-
lenge and a promise, it is also a burden, for there may be rest
from labor, but retirement from the field of self -development is
never permitted. When MeLeish's ]. B. departs from the course
taken by his Biblical predecessor, it may be to assume this
peculiarly modem burden. (It may be, for the tortuous ending
of the pky does not permit an unqualified interpretation.)

But let us be clear that an identification of self with an ever
unaccomplished mission is not peculiarly modern. To seek the
infinite, the perfect, and the unattainable runs deep in the cultural
blood stream. The search for the Holy Grail, Utopia, the Fountain
of Youth, El Dorado, and the New Jerusalem have, in their re-
spective epochs of history, filled the imaginations of men trudg-
ing the via vitae. The specific nature of the search, however, is
defined differently for each era. Whereas once the search for a
sacred chalice stirred men's imaginations and concentrated their
energies, the quest has now centered on the inner self. Those who
ask "Who am I?", those who are concerned with the problem of
personal identity, certainly reflect current confusion and malaise,
but in so doing they say, in effect: If we are to fulfill ourselves,
we must understand what is meant by the *X W

In the period of American agrarian culture the external form
of the search was derived from the Biblical concept of the
Promised Land and became specific in the American Dream. As
with all such goals, its attainment was not expected to be easy.
Struggle and work were necessities. But there was no thought of
failure* for the capacity of mortal man was deemed adequate
for every earthly task. Success could and would be realized. The
folk language gave voice to the purpose, the means, and the
optimism, as in Franklin's catchy aphorisms for all the homey
virtues: prudence (*A stltdi in time saves nine"), thrift (**A

166 : The Beality and the Promise

penny saved is a penny earned"), fortitude ("God helps those
who help themselves"). In substance they proclaimed that man's
destiny was his own choice and doing, with success or failure
observable in the public market and forum.

The American Dream could be realized only if the material
conditions of sin were removed. And to accomplish this end it
was necessary for the American to become a materialist. 3 Only
when man had been released from his enslavement to poverty,
disease, and toil could soul and intellect flower. Franklin's Me
presents the American ideal of personal, psychological Utopian-
ism just as his aphorisms represent the other side of American
Me, that of unalloyed materialism. Franklin sought wealth that
he might have leisure to pursue the study of nature, uncontami-
nated by any mercenary intent. The honors he received from his
countrymen for his public services he lightly deprecated; for
one thing, these services fell in the category of duties that had
to be performed, and for another, neither honors nor riches could
recompense for time and youth that might have been spent in
purely intellectual pursuits.

Like Franklin, we too have earned enough wealth so that we
are free from the drives of hunger and cold, free to pursue the
spiritual and intellectual ends of Me. And too we find that our
expectations do not come to pass as we (and Franklin) had
rather naively believed they would.

But our case is different in that our goals are no longer pre-
dominantly external (to understand nature and the material
world) but internal Freed from the crushing burdens of material
existence, we proclaim that man must now confront the obligation
to fulfill himself as an individual personality. And yet we still
hang back Nor is it the demands of public duty that keep us
from directly pursuing the ideal of self-fulfillment. It is rather a
strange failure of nerve. We advertise ourselves into a hankering
for yet more material objects. We propagandize ourselves into
seeing the Russians or the Chinese as the prime threats to our
corporate security. And thus we artfully try to escape paying the

Science and Self-Fulfillment : 167

price of being who we are and what we are at this historical
moment.

THE BASIC IDEAS OF AMERICAN SOCIETY

Beliefs may be considered from either of two viewpoints. On
the objective side, certain dominant ideas in a society are function-
ally related to other aspects of that society; thus, for example, it
is a prime objective of many social scientists to explain how the
religious beliefs of a people are related to their economic and
political behavior, or how cosmological beliefs derive from a
society's level of technological achievement.

But beliefs may also be considered on the subjective side: from
this angle of regard an observer attempts to understand how an
individual's sense of self exists in and is expressed through the
ideas of his society. The subjective side is our concern here;
specifically, we want to see how the individual American comes
to have a distinctive self -concept, derived from those unques-
tioned ideas he learned along with his native tongue.

American Society and the Nature of the Universe

Americans departed from the authentic Christian interpreta-
tion of history and nature long ago. The Christian account of man
and his world presented human society, the civitas terrae, as a
vale of tears and shadows, a temporary stage on which was played
the drama of God's purposes divine creation, human sinfulness
and finitude, the redemption of man in the passion of Christ, and
salvation availing to man in his suffering on this earth. Rather
early in the nineteenth century die American mentality split
salvation into two parts: divine and earthly, not to say earthy. 4
The resulting schism did not receive theological reconciliation
until much later (the Social Gospel movement), for theology is
necessarily a parasitical and post hoc intellectual activity.

In practice Americans worked hard, even feverishly, to free
themselves from the curse of Adam by inventions, by opening

168 : The Realty and the Promise

up more fertile lands, and by establishing social systems to pro-
tect men from overwork, poverty, disease, famine, and exploita-
tion. Though they may have hesitated to utter the sacrilegious
statement, ^This land with its bounty is our salvation,** they
nevertheless acted it out in health, in strength, and in pride. Yet
when they were afraid, or old or sick, or struck with the death
of loved ones, they did not forget that other salvation. They con-
fessed their sin and pondered their personal and collective guilt.
They ate the bitter fruit of tragedy in loneliness, or they sought
collective forms of repentance in evangelistic movements, in
bizarre and incongruous cults, in sectarian shifts over hairsplitting
points in a theology that was, in effect, all anti-intellectual funda-
mentalism. The nineteenth century American was, and knew he
was, a Christian heretic in the most profound sense. He could
never forgive himself for it, and he knew the God of Vengeance
would never forgive him. Having accepted his alienation from
God, the best he could hope for was peace with the moral de-
mands of tiiis world. 5

The mid-twentieth century American has evolved beyond this
cosmic sense of guilt, though not beyond all sense of guilt. He
now believes that there exists a method for understanding the
forces of the universe and that American society was once,
though it may be no longer, the society most fuUy in possession
of that method. The method, of course, is that of science, and
its outward manifestation is technology. The idea of the scientific
method, as represented in the philosophy of logical positivism,
Is a theological masterpiece. It provides, at least in principle, an
answer to any question about the nature of the universe, dis-
missing those questions for which BO answer is forthcoming as
meaningless. "Meaningless" or "heretical" : both mean that
which cannot be said while maintaining conformity to the ac-
cepted system. 6

In addition to answering fundamental questions, the scientific
method also enables us to bring into the daily practices of lif e
into the production, promotion, and distribution of goods, into

Sdenc and Slf-FiiIfiIImiit : 1619

military defense, even into the morality of dealing with people
the revelations vouchsafed us in research.

To understand the operative religion of a society, one must
look at the prescribed rituals surrounding the great events of lif e,
particularly birth, marriage, and death. In America today the
rituals performed by the medical profession and sanctioned by
scientific method have truly sacred status. Babies are born in
hospitals and their coming is preceded by elaborate purification
ceremonies that drive away or wash away unseen threats to their
health. (The ceremonial ablutions of surgeons make particularly
effective film sequences.) Men and women who wish to be
married must present themselves to a functionary of the science
and there give their blood for his examination. If signs in the
microscope augur ill, neither priest nor politician is powerful
enough to perf onn a fully legal marriage for the couple. At death,
a man may have his priest to absolve him, and his family or
friends to mourn him, but he must have a doctor to pronounce
him dead and to explain in the language of science why this man
had to die.

To describe our a>mmunal regulations of birth, marriage, and
death as ceremonies and rituals is not to deny that we do these
things for good scientific reasons. Of course we do; that is just
the point. Our unquestioning belief in the scientific method is
such that we are unlikely to recognize that we organize and carry
out the great ceremonial occasions of life in the language and
acxx>uterments of science. We do not ordinarily see anything to
remark about these actions; they are natural, normal, and ex-
pected. The language and aceoutexments of science enable us to
bring into one more or less harmonious whole our beliefs about
the origin of the universe and of life within it, about human
beings and their special (but not too special) place in the scheme
of things, and about birth, death, and sex in their particular
appearaiiees. So it is with any smoothly working system of re-
ligious beliefs.

This great scheme of tilings is invoked not only in the great
Aythmic occasions of life but also in both the more routine and

170 : The Reality and the Promise

the more spectacular decisions we are forced to make. The appeal
to science in advertising and public relations is so well recog-
nized that it needs no comment here. The use of pseudo-scientific
criteria in both legal and literary judgments has also received
considerable attention. The interstices of daily life those pauses
when we ponder, judge, and decide are filled with the sound
if not the spirit of the scientific method. We wouldn't know how
to decide anything (as opposed to choosing in a purely arbitrary
manner) if we did not have the scientific method ultimately to
rely on. 7

What is true of daily life is also true of the truly epochal de-
cisions that confront us as a people. When Harry Truman was
forced to decide whether to use the atomic bomb over Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, he turned to military men and scientists as his
advisers. Their presence and the nature of their counsel remind
one willy-nilly of the augurs of ancient Rome examining chicken
entrails. Mr, Truman noted his own prayers to Providence but
said nothing about answers to them. He consulted neither a
cleric, nor a moral philosopher, nor even a respected political
savant, but he asked the scientists whether the (to him) in-
scrutable Fates would favor alternative plans. They told him
that only the dropping of the Bomb had favorable omens. Who
among us would have, could have, dared defy the voice of
science? 8

In our unquestioning devotion to science lies the solution to
why the appearance of Sputnik I struck us so forcibly. We are
no longer sure, as we once were, that we are the chosen people
of science. The fact that European theorists had made major
contributions to scientific knowledge could not shake our faith
in our chosenness, for we believed in salvation by works, not
by theory. And we had proved in numberless ways our unique
capability to put scientific revelations to work*

Our faith has been shaken by Sputnik; it has not been lost In
typical American fashion we are putting pressure on the schools
to regain for us the leadership we feel is morally ours. We have
not only to teach more science and teach it more effectively, we

Science and Setf-FaUUIment ; 171

have also to liberate young minds so that they may add creatively
to the total store of scientific knowledge.

Because science is our most fundamental system of beliefs,
because science requires a mental discipline different from any
that we learn in the informal training of home and neighborhood,
and because science is itself an ever changing system of beliefs
because of all these things and more, our schools have, or ought
to have, a distinctive character and spirit. Let us note one feature
of a school dominated by the scientific habit of thought which
in turn becomes part of the unquestioned system of beliefs of
the individual, that is, that in a very special way among us, the
future always belongs to youth. For as scientific study depends
less than any other study on a wide range of concrete experience
and more on abstract symbolic formulations, scientific thought
can be learned and known by very young men and women. This
is special. In all other systems of thought, the highest forms of
knowledge are those acquired through a lifetime of experience,
discourse, and contemplation. As opposed to any other form of
knowledge, science is altogether communicable. The mature and
experienced scientist cannot say to his student: *1 know certain
mysteries of nature that you must discover for yourself." This
makes sense in any other system of thought, but not in science.
If the scientist knows what he claims to know, then he can say
it, and moreover he can express it with such precision that his
students can learn it exactly as it is taught What he cannot say,
he does not know.

This fact of the relative advantage of youth carries on to the
interpersonal relations between teacher and pupil. Teachers know
and pupils sense that immaturity is no longer the barrier that
it once was to full knowledge of tie world. Immaturity actually
means greater potentiality. The reasonably intelligent boy of
twelve will inevitably have a bettor understanding of his world
at age sixty than does his teacher of that age now, and the
mutual recognition of that fact colors the relation between them.
Respect, authority, and discipline in the classroom are altered in

172 : The Reality and the Promise

character when the scientific mode of thought dominates the
intellectual scene,

This is not to say y of course, that Americans really know
science and practice scientific method in their thinking nor that
American schools are altogether like scieBtific technicums. The
influence is more subtle. For no one can seriously doubt that
the honorific sense of the "scientific" dominates all classroom
instruction: **What really happened? 3 * "How can you explain
that?" "What will happen if we do this?" "How do you know?"
"Whafs the importance of that?" These are the standard classes
of questions in ordinary pedagogy, rightfully asked in the teach-
ing process. 10 Now imagine two answers given to any one of
them, one answer beginning, "Scientifically speaking . . . " and
the second, "Of course it's unscientific to say so, but. . . ." Which
of these carries more weight, inspires more respect and atten-
tion? Please note that the answer would be the same whether
we are speaking of the first grade or the fourteenth, of physical
education, physics, civics, Russian history, English literature, or
driver training* How far the canons of truly scientific thought
have penetrated school practices is a question to be answered
only after extensive empirical investigation guided by rigorously
formed definitions of what is scientific, but it is easily seen that
the honorific sense of the scientific has come to dominate school-
ing as well as the rest of the culture. Its identification with
youth, change, and anti-authoritarianism adds one element to
the distinctive character of American schools.

It goes without saying that these features are also elements in
the distinctive American sense of self.

American Society and the Drama of History

If the fundamental idea of the scientific method provides a re-
markably successful way of giving reasoned consistency to a
wide range of beliefs about the nature of the cosmos and man's
place in it, this theology has naoore difficulty in providing an inter-
pretation erf history and man s place in the drama erf his owm

Science and Setf-FiiMInient : 173

species. The first step in a historical interpretation is fairly simple:
the United States has achieved its status as chief among all the
nations by virtue of its devotion to the free application of the
scientific method. Our efficiency, our orderliness, our ability to
organize things in a scientifically acceptable fashion are taken
as the touchstone of the lightness of our social conventions, of
our right to regard ourselves as the chosen people of all history.

This importance we have attached to "getting things done" is
seen most clearly, if paradoxically, in the discontents with exist-
ing social relations that are found in the ordinary American. His
gripe about the way things are run is always most emphatically
expressed in the name of getting things done. This tendency has
given an odd cast to the history of reform movements in the
United States. The moral horror aroused in Grant's Army of the
Tennessee on contact with slavery was not so much because of
the injustice of the system as because of its inefficiency. Thus in
the last quarter of the nineteenth century the country could
applaud the use of federal troops against strikers because strikes
interfered with production of steel or delivery of mail. Similarly
our sense of outrage which follows revelations of irregularities
by unions, the military, and civic officials stems less from the
inherent immorality of individual actions than from the fact that
irregular practices interfere with the effective, scientifically ac-
ceptable ways of organizing people to get the job done, whether
the job be the production and distribution of goods, national de-
fense, or public schooling.

But all this is essentially static. It doesn't satisfy the deep-
seated need to see our own nation in the dynamic flow of human
history. Does the average American today regard Ms country as
standing in the vanguard of social changes that are heading in
the direction foretold by our older American ideology? It is
doubtful. Our professed aim in 1917 was to make the world safe
for democracy, in 1941 to achieve the Four Freedoms, in 1950
to prevent successful Communist aggression. These represent a
steady retreat from a unitary and simple-minded view of our
jdace in the history <rf mankind. The idea of automatic progress

174 : The Reality and the Promise

has fled the American's consciousness. We are no longer sure that
we lead the world nor even that the world is heading in the
direction indicated by the ideals of liberty and equality, which
we appropriated and made peculiarly our own in the nineteenth
century.

But if none of these older notions of America's role in history
still have compelling force in the beliefs of our citizens (in the
name of science we rewrote our history to debunk our traditional
heroes and to get rid of these outmoded notions in our historical
consciousness) and if the scientific method, our most funda-
mental religious notion in the cosmic sense, does not provide us
with a viable myth concerning our historical destiny, there is one
sense in which we still have an ideal by which to interpret history
and our role in it. That ideal is personal, individual self-
development.

Kenneth Galbraith complains that we have a completely un-
balanced ratio between the production of goods for private con-
sumption and goods for our public, communal life. 11 Though
justified from an economic viewpoint and even from the stand-
point of capacity of satisfying personal needs as these are in-
fluenced by the public conditions of life, Galbraith nonetheless
overlooks the fact that our level of private consumption is all
that still distinguishes us historically from the rest of the world.
Here is where we take our stand; this is what we have to offer
as our contribution to the historical destiny of the human race.
And so we are sometimes taken aback when others seem to be
less than overwhelmed by our standard of living, when we are
accused of being idle materialists in our views on human welfare.
Fdr we regard our high standard of living as the necessary con-
dition for individual self-fulfillment^ and we find it impossible
to believe that other societies would not like to move toward
this ideal if they were not prevented by poverty or by selfish
leaders who hold the people in subjection and forbid their ex-
pression of true desires and aspirations. The ordinary man in the
street believes that everyone in the world would like to be an
American, not just in order to have an automobile, but because
the possession of an automobile is a step toward that ideal of

Science and Self-Fulfilment : 175

individual self -fulfillment which we have created and offered to
share with others.

Insofar as our policies toward other nations reflect our uncon-
scious belief that they all would like to join the Union, we may
find ourselves badly misunderstood on the international scene.
Likewise, if we do not grasp what the historical ideal of self-
fulfillment offers besides automobiles and refrigerators, we will
badly misunderstand ourselves.

1. For it does not mean, as some have thought, that the Ameri-
can is free from the pressure of work. We are not fulfilled by
being freed from work; on the contrary, our work is a part of
our fulfillment. Indeed, a distinctive feature of the new American
way of life that we wish to share with the rest of the world is
the ideal of a job's being a part of man's movement toward his
own personal potentialities. Although, as we shall see in a moment,
this belief becomes part of a fundamental ambivalence in the indi-
vidual, at the social level there is no contradiction. The evidence
of science supports our belief that the worker who finds his job
a contributing increment toward his own personal growth is also
the most productive worker, and we can thus easily reconcile this
part of our historical contribution to mankind wtih our belief in a
scientific theology. 12

2. As leisure time becomes available to all classes of people
and as more and more activities become priced within the reach
of everyone, then everyone can pursue whatever kinds of play-
pursuits he finds helpful in achieving his own maximum growth.
In the nineteenth century, play in the urban environment was
one of three very different things: the vulgar, ostentations,
estheticaliy ridiculous pursuits of the idle rich; the limited, re-
strained, and sometimes uncomfortable Sunday family picnic of
the bourgeoisie; or the brutal drinking, whoring, and wife-beating
Saturday night among the working classes. All these, fortunately,
are obsolescent today. In play and in work, we hold up our high
consumption of material goods as the condition that enables us
to make these an aspect of personal self-fulfillment for every
person. 13

3. Our patterns of sexual relations and family life admit of

176 : The Reality and the Promise

precisely the same analysis. When Marx said that the capitalists
made of the family an economic relation stultifying love and
creativity, he was describing quite accurately the conditions in
Europe at the time. 14 Our high level of material wealth, makes
it possible for us to remove most of the purely economic func-
tions from the family. Young people can marry for love, not
dowries; girls can regard their virginity in terms of its intrinsic
relation to their personal growth rather than in terms of its market
value; and young people are no longer forced either to have
children or prevent them for purely economic reasons but can
plan families in relation to tie self-fulfilling aspects of child
rearing.

The point should be clear enough by now. We see our place in
the historical scheme of things, in the great drama of the human
species, in the cosmically brief interlude between the appearance
of the human race and its extinction in the inevitable course of
astronomical heat cycles, as offering to mankind the ideal of self-
fulfillment through (though not exclusively by) the production
of a sufficiently high level of material wealth to free the indi-
vidual from economic determinism in his work, play, sexual
relations, family life, and indeed all the manifold realms of human
activity. These are the terms in which we now interpret the lines
inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, except for the fact that we
no longer require that the people come to us. We will go wherever
we are asked, to help others achieve the requirements of self-
fulfillment for themselves,

We have discussed the ideal of self -fulfillment as if it had no
intrinsic or necessary connection with the metaphysics of science-
technology. From one point of view, this is quite obviously Justi-
fied. We can point to other civilizations, particularly the USSR,
where a scientific, technological, world outlook is deliberately
cultivated, but the American ideal of self-fulfillment is regarded
as bourgeois-decadent nonsense. (As the ideal of self-fulfillment
comes operatively to dominate individual lives, the USSR will
most likely have to change its official line. Mass production must
either find this outlet or be used for war.) On the other hand,

Science and Setf-FoMImert: : 177

titie Catholic Church is committed to a particular version of the
ideal of self-fuffiUment, though strongly rejecting the total scien-
tific world view.

But at a deeper level, the ideal of self-fulfillment and die
scientific world view are related by more than historical accident
The very progress in scientific inquiry that dispelled the illusion
of man's centrality in the universe also revealed his hitherto un-
suspected powers as the animal that knows. IB the history of
philosophy, epistemology car the investigation of how man can
know marched together with his increasing knowledge. Then
came an exaltation of man as a creature of feeling and will, be-
cause these aspects of the human animal were so markedly dif-
ferent from the blind mechanical conception of nature that
science was elaborating. Today, as the study of man is developing
its appropriate scientific techniques and theories, one cannot but
see the results as revealing "human potentialities/* the possibili-
ties for men and women *T>ecoming^ more of what they could
be, 15

A thorough study of the historical relation between these two
ideas (self-fulfillment as tike supreme human good and a scien-
tific world outlook) is far beyond the scope of our present pur-
poses. It may be the relation is purely accidental. Even so, when
the American wants to explain the world or his place in it, his
appeal is to science, and when he wants to interpret American
history and to give a moral justification far our enormous wealth,
he appeals, more or less articolately, to the ideal of self -fulfill-
ment and our willingness to share it with the rest of the world.
These two fundamental ideas make up the distinctive American
character,

3MOTVIDIJAL EXPBESSION AND COMMITMENT

How does the individual American see himself in relation to
these cosmic ideas and ideals? By and large he 1ms followed an
American tradition and made his peace with the universe. He has
built for his scientist-shaman the world's largest radio telescope,

ITS : The Reality and the Promise

magnificent research centers and nuclear accelerators, Bne hos-
pitals and medical research facilities, even a "think-tank" for the
social sciences. The universe, Dr. Einstein and his successors,
and the average American get along quite well together, the last
being convinced that the first two know each other rather well
and that the second will promptly pass along any secrets he
has about the first (If the relation between the first two is not
as good as we should like, why well jack up the schools and
remedy the situation as quickly as that sort of thing can be
remedied.)

What are the beliefs of the American about himself in relation
to American society? What are the beliefs that are expressed in
the everyday lives of millions of Americans who work conscien-
tiously at their tasks on the job, in the home, at school, and
in their community who thus maintain the most fantastically
complex social, political, and economic system that the world has
ever known? We must try to see this set of beliefs at two levels:
the overt, explicit, manifest level and the covert, implicit, latent
level.

Aboveboard, things are rather smooth, at least for the vast
majority who are integrated into the main stream of what Lerner
calls the American success. The necessary social services are per-
formed within institutional arrangements that do protect men
and women from the worst features of human exploitation. There
is a fluidity of social structure, giving objective validation to the
American's belief that he can move, physically and socially, just
about wherever he would like to move. And withal, there is a
permanence and stability about the system, assuring that his
achievements will amount to something and give him a place
and role that will endure through the rapid changes going on all
around.

In this country there are many different status systems. Busi-
ness^ science, military, the arts, community service, academic life,
old-family, and sports these are not all occupational groupings,
but they are all status systems with (more or less well-recog-
nized) ways of deciding what spot in any one system corresponds

Science and Self-Fulfillment : 170

to a spot in another. To us it is most significant that each of
these varied status systems provides a minutely graded series
of steps from the lowest rung to the highest Because the indi-
vidual person knows truly that he can move fairly easily to the
next, objectively scarcely distinguishable, rung above him, he
can believe that he can move anywhere on the ladder whether
on his Job, in his play, his activities as a consumer, or his family
life. In this fact is found the functional reason behind the clever
and much-maligned Parkinson's Law in administration. 10 There
is some evidence that if the measure of social mobility is in big
jumps, as is found in Europe, then our belief in an open social
status system is a myth. 17 But this is not the way of our system.
The easy movement from rung to rung is the meaningful move-
ment, and it is for this reason that most Americans are not
seriously disturbed when N. S. Khrushchev and C. Wright Mills
tell us that there is a ruling clique in America with very severe
restrictions for admission. 18 We do not ask to be admitted to that
level in the status system; at any given moment we want to be
able to move only to the next higher level. We feel this step
easily possible if we are willing to behave in the manner de-
manded by the particular system we happen to belong to.

In this belief the mind of the American seems adequately at-
tuned to reality and withal peaceful enough, but at the implicit
level there is a rub. For the American finds that he has com-
mitted himself to the cult of self-fulfiflment, and its requirements
are more exacting than the demands from Cotton Mather's pulpit
ever were. At least the demands of Cotton Mather's God were
dear enough so a man might know precisely wherein he had
transgressed. If they were beyond human power to accomplish
and if God were utterly implacable in his justice, a man might
stand in deadly fear of his Lord, but he need not have the con-
stant, nagging anxiety that besets the modern soul, The Organi-
zation Man is the inevitable outcome when one must look upon
his job not merely as a way of making a living but as an avenue
toward personal growth. T want to work with people** is a
recurring comment heard by those who prepare teachers, and

180 : Th Reality and the Promise

the reason given is always the same: "Because working with
people comes closer than any other work to giving me an ap-
portunity to continue my own growth as a person." Because
work is thus tied in with the historical ideal of our civilization,
its demands are limitless. The vaunted growth in leisure time as
offering the ideal of self-fulfillment is a will-o'-the-wisp in actu-
ality, for the demands of the job also become the demands of
self-fulfillment, and these can know no limits.

And, in effect, work and its demands also still involve, and
must involve, many activities that could never be called oppor-
tunities for personal growth. In any job, the individual finds
himself torn between the (at least occasionally) dreary actuali-
ties of his existence and the moral demand that he must continue
always to grow as a person. Even to the extent that the job does
contribute to this ideal, its demands become greater upon all
aspects of a person's life and thus prevent him access to other
forms of activity which he knows must also be included in the
well-developed personality.

The same is true of play and family life. How is a man to
choose among the plethora of play activities available in every
sphere of life? The popular magazine asks us to ponder this
question: "Does your marriage help you grow into the kind of
parson you could be? w But just consider the range of things you
might know, but do not. The sights, tastes, and sounds you could
enjoy, but have not. The depths of feeling you might plumb,
but have not? Marriage is no longer a contract, nor even a
companionship. It is a union, temporary or permanent, of two
persons seeking the infinite, vaguely aware that the search must
be futile, guilty in that awareness, and constantly upbraided by
their culture for their failure.

The resulting anxieties, being too great to be borne by the
human psyche, are projected into the external condition. "If we
only could afford a larger apartment ..." "If only there was
one more week of vacation in the year. . " "If we could just be
sure that Johnny could get into college. ." These and all the
other "if onlyV are pure fantasies. SeM-fulfillment is not like an

Science and Self-Fulfillment : 181

asymptotic curve with a limit; it is like the infinite progression
of natural numbers. At least so it seems to those who Mve with
this ideal, who must exhibit it to the world as the central core
of the American way of life whose origin and meaning elude the
understanding of the rest of the world.

Perhaps the tension is seen most clearly in the behavior of
American tourists abroad. Unfortunately no longer innocent,
Americans abroad discover that the cult of self-fulfillment has
left them guilt-ridden in the extreme. Relieved of the discipline
of daily work, they find themselves driven to see, to experience,
to climb to the heights and plumb to the depths as far as their
talents and education permit. The more and the less sophisticated
separate themselves according to the objects pursued, but both
exhibit the same drives. And when the inexhaustible demands
become too great, they escape into drink and debauchery, again
dividing themselves by capacity. The overwhelming impression
of the observer is the humorlessness of the whole thing.

For this reason, we must also deny the fact of death and deal
with the existence of pain and tragedy as symptoms of an illness
to be treated by practitioners of the scientific method. No matter
who you are or what you are, you can, ought, and must be more
and better than you are! 19 Thus proclaims our new American
creed, thus sermonizes scientific psychology. There is no room
here for the coward or the sluggard. It is impossible to over-
estimate the importance of this doctrine, if we are to understand
the contemporary American mind. Our scientific world view has
removed all purpose, meaning, and finality from the universe
as a whole. The disillusioning experiences of this century have
taken the idea of automatic progress out of our conception of
history; they have left us incapable of fully accepting any social
or collective goals as the ultimately valuable ends of existence.
The logical last step has to be taken: each person must create
within his own brief lif e his own reason for being; there is nothing
beyond, before, or behind from which he may draw ultimate
justification. He cannot even accede to C. I. Lewis' appealing
doctrine that the final value is "a life found good on the whole,**

182 ; The Reality and the Promise

for this life might be one of passive accommodation to circum-
stances. 20 No, he must take upon himself the full burden of self-
fulfillment because, in the final analysis, that is life's only
justification. That he may share that burden in the nuclear family
does not lessen its weight, but each of the partners may shift the
load so that the combined burden may be borne.

It is quite clear that this attitude toward Hfe can and does
have pathological consequences, 21 and yet the creed of self-
fulfillment is accepted and internalized and successfully lived
with by the overwhelming majority of Americans. There are
several phenomena that help to explain how this is possible. First,
the culture provides a very wide range of acceptable avenues
for temporary regression, ways in which one can be idle (for at
least a short time) without excessive guilt. 22 Second, a marriage
and family pattern has evolved that allows (in principle) the
fullest expression of all ranges of selfhood and thus permits a
sharing of the burden imposed by the creed. And third, the
corporate system, with its own potentialities for unlimited growth,
provides a public analogue, if not an object of identification, for
the individual's own socially imposed drives.

But all these are no more than palliatives, unless the man or
woman who is caught up in this system can at once -feel its pull
for change, for the exercise of initiative, and for personal growth
and at the same time know the system with sufficient objectivity
and detachment to escape being victimized by it.

9

THE
CORPORATE SOCIETY

AND
EDUCATION

The private world of family and individual must be considered
as one extreme of a great contin.uum which joins in bipolar con-
trast the public world of the great social superstructures. The one
cannot be understood without the other, and the tensions which
unite and separate them create difficult problems in the relations
between individual and group. With neither design nor planning
education has found itself heir to a distinctive function in the
intermediate position which it occupies between family and
corporate system. For the crucial structural position which the
schools occupy is that of a bridge across which the child must
move preparatory to his participation in the adult and public
world, and as he does so there is a simultaneous weakening of
his ties to his specific nuclear family and his bondage to its nar-
row social orbit.

184 : Hie Reality and the Promise

Given this fact of social and cultural transformation, there are
two principal questions which we must examine in our quest for
an understanding of the relation of education and commitment.
What are the significant forces creating the transformation., and
how have they been manifested? And secondly, what are the
consequences for the process of education and the organization
of the schools? If we begin with a brief treatment of the second
question, our subsequent analysis of the first one will be better
understood. The ever sharper separation between the private
world of family and locality and the public corporate world has
placed a responsibility upon the schools which does not yet seem
to be understood. A part of our effort will be to examine the
extent to which the transitional responsibility is now being met
and to propose modifications in the educative process which the
situation demands.

Teaching is no longer, if it ever was, the simple interchange
between a symbolic Mark Hopkins on one end of the log and a
student on the other. Like other institutions, education now re-
flects the massive complexity of our society. An almost endless
list of details surround, affect, and interpose themselves in the
educational process: problems of school finance, budget, con-
struction, and maintenance; of administration, public relations,
reporting, and law; of curriculum, testing, subject matter, and
placement; of training, mechanical devices, and auxiliary person-
nel; of guidance, mental and physical health, recreation, and pro-
fessionalization. The coordination and supervision of increased
administrative and specialized personnel to meet the demands of
much larger school systems and their complex operations have
led to a bureaucratization which in outline resembles that of a
government agency or of an industrial corporation.

Although, in theory, the opposite effect has been intended from
the modern tendency to devote ever greater attention in energy,
time, and budget to operational and organizational problems in
the schools, the result has been a corresponding diminution of
emphasis upon what transpires in the classroom. For although
the bureaucracy has been created to facilitate aad improve the

Hbe Corporate Society and Education s 185

teaching process, inevitably the coordinating and supervising
function becomes paramount, as can be witnessed in the sad
state of the New York City school system. Inherent in the man-
agerial ethos, at the point whore authority touches the supervised,
is distrust of freedom, initiative, and nonconformity. In schools
the point of contact is found not only in the relation between
the teacher and student but also in the relation of administrator
to teacher. College presidents, deans, superintendents, and prin-
cipals suffer persistently from anxiety that their teachers may
do or say things that will attract unfavorable attention to their
institutions, and parental concern of possible ill effects of teacher
behavior upon their children also Bnds expression from time to
time. Infrequently, parents or school administrators bestow their
approbation upon dedicated service, but teachers know that the
full measure of appreciation can come from only one source-
those whom they teach.

Censure and reward in teaching illustrate the distinctive struc-
tural position of the educative process. Parents send immature
human beings possessing the capacities for growth and hurt, for
whom they retain responsibility, give love, and have aspirations,
into a situation in which they no longer have full control As
they relinquish, they must also entrust. If the child is subject
to an incompetent teacher or, in the more extreme case, ends up
in a blackboard Jungle, the courses of action open to the ordinary
parent are relatively few. The teacher, on the other hand, must
operate within the conditions imposed by the bureaucracy. These
may aid or hinder the educational task, but in either event there
is an implicit conflict of interest between tie managerial and
educative functions, posing a threat to the kind of educational
institution which a society that prizes individual development
and personal liberty must have.

The dilemma arises because erf the necessary juxtaposition of
both managerial and educative functions: if the former takes
precedence, then the latter must suffer, yet the complexity of
the educative process requires both specialization and coordina-
tion. The resolution of the impasse, we believe, rests in neces-

186 : The Reality and the Promise

sary modification of both aspects. Reform of the educative
process in accord with the principles of scientific discovery is
mandatory, but a necessary corollary is organizational reform.
The present school organization, with its traditional chain of
command and bureaucratic patterns, destroys initiative and in-
hibits the creativity of the teaching-learning process; it cannot
accomplish the task ahead. In its place must come a type of
human association which releases the student from his debilitating
supervised role and places the organizational structure at his
disposal for purposes of learning. Such an arrangement is so
utterly strange to present practice and to the direction in which
elementary and secondary education has been moving that we
doubt many can work out procedures for achieving it, let alone
grasp what the objectives or results may be. To those who have
some sense of the urgency and the worth of the solution let us
give assurance that the scientists, engineers, and technicians at
the Red Stone Arsenal have unwittingly evolved just this type
of organization as a necessity for projecting man into space. Later
on we shall sketch a form of human association different from
the lock-step bureaucracy that has come to dominate school
organization.

Our first step, however, is to understand the social habitat in
which the educational enterprise operates. To that end, we pro-
pose to trace briefly the organizational changes in American
society and to describe some aspects of the corporate system. In
the process we shall indicate what structural similarities and dif-
ferences the schools exhibit in comparison with corporate
organization.

THE OKGANIZATIONAL BEVOLUTTON

When Henry Adams traveled west in 1904 to attend the St.
Louis Exposition, he was aghast at the changes which had trans-
formed the people and the countryside in a ten-year span. He
found tall chimneys reeking smoke, "dirty suburbs filled with
scrap iron, scrap paper and cinders," but more distressing to him

The Corporate Society and Education : 187

was the new American, "the child of steam and the brother of
the dynamo ... a product of so much mechanical power, and
bearing no distinctive marks but that of its pressure." 1 However
much the comments of this wry observer may be overdrawn,
they dramatize the change which the diffusion of industrialism
brought to America's heartland.

But his perturbation extended beyond the surface effects of
this new force let loose upon the land. He looked back to the
period beginning in the 1840*5 and saw there the initial emer-
gence of that new power vested in the corporations which
through the years had fathered those great trusts with which
Teddy Roosevelt battled just after the turn of the century. Adams
called them "obnoxious because of their vigorous and "unscrupu-
lous energy. They were revolutionary, troubling all the old con-
ventions and values, as the screws of ocean steamers must
trouble a school of herring. They tore society to pieces and
trampled it under foot." 2 Although his detachment took him to
the sidelines as a curious onlooker, lie gauged that the problem
before the public was not merely to control the "trusts" by law
but to create a society that could manage them.

If Adams could visit the America of the early igGo's, he would
discover that he had observed only the incipient stages of the
phenomenon of bigness. He would marvel and perhaps despair
at the new industrial giants, some of them not yet born in 1904,
that now eclipse the meat-packing, railroad, and oil monopolies
of his day. He would encounter mammoth and powerful labor
unions whose leaders negotiate contracts with the managers of
the great business leviathans, contracts that insure union mem-
bers ever expanding chunks from profits and added protection
for the status quo. He would be astounded at a central govern-
ment grown huge with new functions for the general welfare
but also forced into the role of arbiter in the conflicting tensions
that arise in the struggles among corporations, labor unions, and
the best interests of the general public. He would find a military
establishment whose massiveness and capacity to draw upon the
national wealth menacingly overshadows all civilian functions.

188 : The Reality and the Promise

Adams would nostalgically recall an older America that also
had been transformed, if not utterly burnt away, in the crucible
of change. But above the noise of the dynamo he would hear
the voices of concern: the hysteria of those seeking a return to
the American virtues of the turn of the century, an America which
Adams could tell them had itself doomed the one he loved in
his boyhood; the strident arguments of economists, planners, and
financial manipulators peddling their nostrums to insure pros-
perity; the dilemma of a public caught in a sequence of alter-
nating alarums and excursions over international crises or defects
in the national economic system; the pondering of kindred souls
over questions of legitimacy and control of big business, of the
protection of the individual against the mammoths of power,
and of the meaning and nature of the forces that produced this
new world.

It might surprise Adams to find that Americans continue to
call their country a democracy, for he would know that the term
now refers to something quite different from what his generation
had meant by it He would discover that a few, however, had
begun to refer to the new industrial metropolitan complex as a
corporate society, although what they had in mind was something
quite different from the totalitarian corporate state. Like Adams,
those who speak so today are concerned to create the devices
to constrain the new powers. 3 Only the future will tell if a
nation founded on democratic political processes and dedicated
to individual freedom and personal dignity can maintain those
principles and objectives in the face of a vast reconstructing of
American life. For the corporate form which troubled "the old
conventions and values'* now dominates the national life. Ours
has become a corporate society.

Through a strange twist in the meaning of words, the corporate
descendants of the entrepreneurs, who unwittingly led the initial
assault upon traditional American social forms from the early
iSoo's on, consider themselves and are labeled conservatives. IB
truth the entrepreneurs who fashioned the social forms joining
wealth, skill, resources, and human organization to the new

The Corporate Society and Education : 189

technologies in textiles, transportation, machinery, steel, food
processing, and oil were the real social revolutionaries. They
concentrated in single enterprises the energies drawn from
numerous sources and in the process created new combinations
of power heretofore -unknown.

The legitimacy and protection of the corporation were be-
stowed originally by state-granted charters. Its bureaucratic or-
ganization was borrowed from government and the army, but
principles of flexibility and initiative were derived from entre-
preneurial industrialism. The cenfedization of authority in a
small managerial elite guaranteed, the control necessary for co-
ordination and supervision, and the gradually evolving principle
of unlimited objectives permitted a catholicity of interest and
activity that could encompass any aspect of the environment
which impinged upon or could be utilized to enhance the or-
ganization. Eventually these groups came less and less to depend
upon outside capital for their growth and proliferation, and drew
increasingly upon their self -generated profits for these purposes.

There remained but one source of power not wholly or con-
tinuously within their orbit of control, the federal and state gov-
ernments. They feared the extension of state power, either
through direct competition or through restrictive regulation.
Legislatures could not always be intimidated or controlled, and
over the years a body of statutory law evolved which was de-
signed to curb the extreme excesses of corporate power. Examples
of such legislation include the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the desig-
nation of certain industries as public utilities with regulatory
commissions for their control, the creation of the Tennessee
Valley Authority as a yardstick against which privately owned
utilities could be measured, and the establishment of the Securi-
ties and Exchange Commission to bring some order into the
abuses of corporation financing. These are all examples of gov-
ernmental intervention, and their justification was twofold: the
necessity to protect the public against unscrupulous exploitation
and tie hope that the power of the private corporation could
be used to promote tie general welfare.

190 : The Reality and the Promise

The progressive movement, which made the fight for the con-
trol of corporate power in the first quarter of the century, culmi-
nating in the social legislation of the New Deal era, was led by
men who wanted to make the system work through reform, not
to destroy or to modify it radically. 4 Even the Socialists had no
quarrel with the basic system. They believed simply that the
public purpose would be better served with a transfer of con-
trol from private to governmental hands.

In this view, then, the business entrepreneurs could be counted
as conservative in one aspect only: they wanted no change in
governmental structure or function that would inhibit their free-
dom of action. Thus aligning themselves on the side of freedom,
they ardently echoed Thomas Jefferson's belief that that govern-
ment governs best which governs least. A democratic government,
according to the business point of view, was one which protected
the rights of the individual and of his property. And, by exten-
sion, the rights of the individual de jure were bestowed upon
the corporation. The legal sanction of the courts had been won
through the application of the "due process" clause of the Four-
teenth Amendment to their activities, 5 and they sought protection
from the demands of labor unions as an unconstitutional infringe-
ment upon these rights. 6 In fact, the activity of any group which
threatened their power and the free exercise thereof could be
castigated as un-American and undemocratic.

But it was in the very exercise of its freedom to act that the
business corporation "tore society to pieces," and although the
effects of their activities may have "trampled" the traditional
American system underfoot, they also brought into being a new
social order as different from the one it displaced as the mercan-
tile era was from the preceding feudalism. In this sense the
leaders of American business have not only been the architects
of a new society but also its social revolutionaries, for the culprit
responsible for the demise of American agrarianism and its way
of life was the American corporate system. Under the banner
of progress and with the concomitant commitment to perpetual
change the battle was won.

The Corporate Society and Education : 191

Ironically, in one of those apparently strange reversals of po-
sition which history plays upon us, the initiative for extending
access to incorporation was centered in the liberals. In the New
York State constitutional convention of 1846 the Democrats over-
powered the conservative Whigs in writing a liberal constitution
which increased the ease with which charters for incorporation
could be granted by the State. Opposition to all the liberalizing
provisions was centered among representatives of big property
interests. In contrast the liberals of that day viewed the corpora-
tion as merely a Joint-stock company, entitled to economic
freedom, 7

From 1840 on there was a gradual increase in the number of
business enterprises which utilized the corporate form for their
organization. (Charters for new business corporations have been
granted at a rate of over 200,000 per year in recent years.) It
was particularly useful in providing the structure within which
new types of enterprises, such as the railroads and mechanized
production, could be organized. The corporation with its greater
internal complexity, its capacity for concentrating increased re-
sources and energies in the utilization of new technology in the
productive processes, and its range of influence extending beyond
the local community proved superior to the individually operated
and small-town or village-centered workshop. Gradually the
craftsmen in leather, wood, iron, food, and fibers gave way before
the influx of machine-made products.

The shift in the social form of the productive unit was only one
of the changes which came in the wake of the proliferating
corporate system. Some socio-economic historians have decided
that the first casualty was the plantation system depending upon
slave labor. 8 Granted that its destruction was forced from with-
out as a result of war, nonetheless one must not discount the
power concentrated in the alliance between the nascent corporate
industrialism of the i86o*s and the commercial agrarianism in
America's heartland and their mutual antipathy to a competing
system. However intended, the effect of civil war was to give a
boost to industrial urbanism.

192 : The Reality and the Promise

There were other casualties, most of these manifested by the
slow erosion of the traditional and its replacement by the new.
Not the least important of these is the now nearly complete
obsolescence of the family farm and rural neighborhood. It will
be remembered that Jefferson pinned his hopes of American
democracy upon a country of land-owning yeomen, and even
Hamilton admitted the primacy of agriculture over manufactur-
ing. Although farmers have been generally reluctant or hesitant
to utilize the corporate form in agricultural production, they are
deeply and intricately woven into the pattern of the corporate
society. Verbally, they espouse the classical laissez faire theory
of production price determined by supply and demand in an
open market with perfect competition but in fact they have
enlisted the most potent of our power centers, the federal gov-
ernment, in support of their social and economic aims. The
conversion of agricultural production into a form ready for con-
sumption, however, is big business. Food processing concerns,
such as Armours, General Mills, General Foods, Borden, and
others now number among the giants of our great enterprises,
but it may be that for some time to come the individual entre-
preneur will still remain the primary agricultural producer. Prob-
ably the big distributing corporations A & P, Safeway, etc.
will soon dominate both basic production and process packaging.
But in any event, the groupings of a rural way of life, including
country school, rural church, neighborhood festivities, and mutual
help, have either disappeared or are functionally residual.

The significance of the social changes in rural life has been
overshadowed by the startling effect of technology upon pro-
duction and manpower. For four decades a major political and
economic concern has been the almost unmanageable surpluses
of agricultural products resulting from an accelerated increase
in output. During the same period, the proportion of the popu-
lation engaged in farming declined from 35 percent in 1910 to
less than 10 percent in 1960. la contrast, during the same period
Russia's attempt to rationaUae agriculture has been only partially
successful and, by its own admission, still requires 45 percent of
the nation's manpower. 9 For reasons which are difficult to com-

The Corporate Society and Education : 193

prehend, the blessings which low from this cornucopia of plenty
have not been adequately appreciated, but the lesson is clear,
A metropoHtan-indiistrial civilization can come into being only
when its accompanying agricultural system supplies massive sur-
pluses of food and fiber. This entails the creation of new social
forms to utilize scientific and mechanical resources, and thus
the full transition to the corporate form is in process. The "fac-
tories in the field" predominate along the East and West coasts
where the emphasis is upon production of fruits and vegetables. 10
A chicken ranch in Georgia that markets a million broilers a
year belongs to a different world than that of the small town
produce merchant who annually bought the two or three dozen
surplus fryers from the farmer's wife. Agriculture has changed
from an activity that provided subsistence for a family to big
business; it has joined with those other segments of American
life which together constitute the great superstructures. And
with its transition, another bastion of traditional America has
crumbled.

Inevitably the transformation of raral life wrecked the neat
symbiotic relation between market, town, and countryside. In the
Midwest and South hundreds of these once flourishing centers
of commerce and social life are experiencing slow death from
stagnation, and unless rescued by industry or tourism, they are
as certainly doomed as were the lumbering and mining boom
towns of the West. But these casualties are of much lesser sig-
nificance than the effect of the outward reach of the corporately
organized merchandisers die mail-order houses and the chain
stores upon the local system of owner-operated retail establish-
ments. 11 The consequences of their spread extend in directions
beyond the purely economic throughout the community. We
may observe changes in family organization, in social class sys-
tem, in the functioning of voluntary organizations, and in the
essential capacity of the community to meet its internal problems*
Of course* not all of these changes can be directly attributed to
modification in the system of retailing, but it was nevertheless
one aspect among many.

In the Main Street towns, the business district was the center

194 : Hie Reality and the Promise

for much of the life of the community. In addition to its ordi-
nary commercial pursuits, this was where professional men re-
ceived clients in their upstairs offices, fraternal associations
maintained their club rooms, luncheon clubs gathered at restau-
rant or hotel, city hall or courthouse received the taxpayer and
law violator, and upper stories housed the faceless nobodies and
sometimes ladies of easy virtue. With the exception of the private
clubs, the doors of these establishments were open to all, the
high and mighty and the lowly. Worker, tradesman, farmer,
merchant, and housewife moved freely in pursuit of their various
ends. Business and professional men were accorded the rank of
substantial citizens, and their decisions, singly or collectively,
gave direction to the public destiny of the community.

The first important change began with the appearance of ma-
chine industry, as the Lynds showed in Middletown. Population
increased, wages stimulated business, and ties to the outside
world were deepened. Before the era of consolidation and re-
mote control by absentee management, these small industries
gave new economic vitality and reduced the dependence upon
agriculture. Their owners assumed a significant, if not domi-
nating, position in the affairs of the town, and in turn the relative
influence of the retailer-businessman declined. 12

But the real assault upon the dominating position of the busi-
ness district began with the spread of the chain stores. First
came the variety store, the five-and-ten. Soon others followed in
the fields of dry goods, drugs, hardware, and groceries. Their
names are those of the great merchandising giants: J. C. Penney,
Montgomery Ward, Sears, W. T. Grant, the Great Atlantic and
Pacific Tea Company, and on and on. Initially the role the
managers of these branch stores played in community life was
quite different than that of the independent retail merchant,
whose personal life was bound up with the problems of the com-
munity. Here today and gone tomorrow, these retailing birds of
passage were primarily concerned with the success of their oper-
ation, as was die manager of the branch plant

The ultimate in the evolution of merchandising is, of course,

The Corporate Society and Education : 195

the shopping center. Its relation is not to a community but to
customers; and it is quite irrelevant who owns or manages the
individual stores, where the employees come from or where they
go. The locality in which these workers live has no importance
to the function they perform. This, then, has been the course
of change, which in its ultimate development has divorced
business from any community function, except a purely com-
mercial one.

The ultimate, of course, is not yet universal. Hundreds of
thousands of small retail and service establishments still remain
scattered across the land performing essential services, and
through the persons of their owners contributing to the well-
being of their locale. In their operation these shops remain out-
side direct control of the corporate system. But their position is
at best interstitial, at worst marginal. Just as in all highly mechan-
ized industries there are still some operations which can be
more cheaply or more easily performed by hand than by auto-
mation, such as window washing or floor scrubbing, so, also,
there persist interstices within the business structure, where the
small entrepreneur finds room to survive. But the pattern is not
one in which he is dominant, for lilce the subsistence family
farmer, he has become obsolescent. What then has happened to
the value we place upon free enterprise and how must we re-
define the ladder of success" for those young men who once
aspired to strike out on their own after some brief apprentice-
ship in a business? Should we conclude with Galbraith that the
opportunity for individual initiative in much of American business
is an illusion? 13 Or should we rather say with Riesman that given
the right personal and social conditions, initiative and opportunity
can be exercised within the corporate system?

VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS WITHIN A CORPORATE SOCIETY

There is a temptation to assert that the real test of the extent
to which our institutions have been transformed into a system of
superstructures depends upon what has happened to the volun-

106 ; T&e Beality and the Rromise

taiy association. It is a type of socal organization that is deep
m owe social fabric and more than a century ago de Tocqueville
marveled at the rapidity and effectiveness with which Americans
could come together voluntarily to solve any problem which
called for group action. la fact one of the first and most famous
agreements was born off the coast of Massachusetts; it is known
as the Mayflower Compact.

If there is any one trait which sets Americans apart from other
peoples it is their proclivity and genius for organization. A stand-
ing jest among academic colleagues is that if three or more of
them should fortuitously meet and discover a common concern,
one could be assured of a new ad hoc committee at the very
least, and not improbably an association possessing constitution,
officers, and a resounding title. The jest is probably just as ap-
propriate in business, government, or sports circles; it illustrates
both the spontaneity with which we utilize the organizational
form and our efficiency in handling it.

Examination of the changes in the system of voluntary associ-
ations must be made within the context of the other transforma-
tions in American life: the shift from the town-community to
metropolis, the growth of big business and big government, tie
elaborated complexity of technological processes, the prolifera-
tion of occupations and spread of specialization, and the modi-
fication of our values around sex, age, and status. In particular it
is necessary to concentrate on understanding tihie function of
voluntary associations in the larger social structure, that is their
tangential position between institutions, persons, and activities.
To draw upon an analogy from biology, voluntary associations
constitute the connective tissues between the major institutional
arrangements of the society. They provide organizational links
through which the diversities of a social system are brought into
some kind of an integrated whole. If we contrast the type and
function of voluntary associations in the community setting with
their counterparts in the metropolitan setting, perhaps the prin-
ciple will be clarified.

The associational pattern of the American community at the

The Corporate Society awl Education s 197

turn of the centary was relatively simple* 14 One found fraternal
lodges and mutual aid societies, patriotic organizations, women's
clubs, and other groups dedicated to athletic, social, political, and
occupational activities. Today their names are less familiar and
their activities have diminished in importance. One recalls the
Grand Army of the Bepublic, the Women's Relief Corps, Odd
Fellows, Masons, Modem Woodmen, the Grange, and the
W.C.T.U. Later, these were joined by the businessmen's groups,
the chambers of commerce, and inncheon clubs, Rotary and Ki-
wanis, and, among youth, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts.
The ones we have named were national in scope, but there were
also local associations, organized for cultural, recreational, or
civic purposes. These groups enriched community life in the
range of interests they served and elicited. They gave expres-
sion to y and joined, differences of age, sex, status, and activity.
They organized the communal observances of national holidays,
and in times of national crisis, they were the groups that sold
bonds, solicited funds, collected scrap, and rolled bandages, 15
They were, and still are, a vital part of the traditional American
community, but neither suburbia nor the core city provided a
congenial environment for tfaek spread. 16

The associational pattern of the community reflected its in-
ternal social and cultural divisions. The significant associations
that express the complexities of contemporary society are those
rekted to the great superstructures and to their internal special-
izations. They join together the thinkers, managers, and doers in
scientific, professional, technical, commercial, and trade associ-
ations. The practitioner of eadb minute specialty can freely unite
with those others who share Ms activity or position, indeed his
freedom not to unite is severely restricted. Doctor, lawyer,
merchant, banker, teacher, engineer, clerk, physicist, barber,
chef, manufacturer, postman, imctonist; conductor, or airline
steward, all have an association which beckons them to member-
ship. 17 Some of them are widely known and their pronounce-
ments publicized, and those with large memberships or great
feiancial backing maintain national headquarters with paid

198 : Hae Keality and the Promise

professional staffs. The American Medical Association, the Na-
tional Association of Manufacturers, the American Psychological
Association, the United States Chamber of Commerce, and the
American Association of University Professors are but a sampling
to illustrate the range.

The professional associations, in particular, promulgate codes
of ethics and may censor or expel members for their violation. All
types maintain lobbies, through which attempts are made to
influence legislation. They support, condemn, or attempt to
modify what is taught in the schools. They make statements about
foreign and economic policies, civil rights, and a host of other
topics. They provide a mouthpiece for otherwise mute or in-
effective segments of the population. The more affluent among
them buy the services of public relations experts, whose skill is
directed toward swaying the public or some special segment
within it.

There is little need to further elaborate upon their activities:
they are sufficiently well known. However, their social signi-
ficance in the scheme of the great superstructures can be made
explicit by contrasting differences between voluntary association
related to community life and those related to the superstructures.
Whereas membership in a family or factors of sex, age, status, or
residence are of prime consideration in the community-type
association, they are irrelevant or of no importance in the pro-
fessional or trade group. A doctor, physicist, professor, manager,
beautician, or cab driver may be of either sex, and the limitations
of age are those related to laws governing employment and the
necessities of acquiring skills. (Some of the larger professional
societies may have local groupings, but geography is not restric-
tive.) Nor is eligibility a function of wealth or status. In other
words, an entirely different set of qualifications, governed by
the characteristics of the special population to which each type
of organization appeals, operates to determine who does or
does not take part

These great encompassing networks of membership and com-
munication penetrate into every locality and honeycomb cor*

The Corporate Society and Education : 199

porations, government agencies, universities, and other organized
entities. Through these groupings the individual is brought into
relation with Ms corporate peers, professional colleagues, and
occupational counterparts throughout the nation. In each locality
the retailer, beautician, real estate broker, contractor, city em-
ployee, or professional is touched by one or more of these associa-
tions. The engineer in government agency, industrial laboratory,
university classroom, or as private consultant, reaches beyond the
confines of his organizational structure into a professional and
technical brotherhood which is supra-local and supra-organiza-
tional. Salesmen, personnel directors, buyers, brokers, and labor-
ers do likewise.

To a very considerable extent the ethics, regulations, and
techniques which govern the practice of a trade or profession
as well as the values and attitudes which govern the relation
with complementary groups are derivative from and given formal
expression within the association. Some, such as the American
Medical Association, possess quite formal machinery for deter-
mining eligibility or imposing sanctions on members, but admin-
istrative, legislative, and judicial devices exist in greater or lesser
degree in all, validated through their use at general membership
conventions and in the on-going administrative process of meet-
ing day-to-day problems. Trade and professional Journals ad-
vance the interests of their members by presenting issues, ideas,
new developments and products, and through advertising, bring
to their attention notice of new books, services, machinery, or
drugs.

Through multitudinous voluntary associations we possess a
vast non-governmental, non-community mechanism which adds
that needed cohesiveness to a metropolitan civilization, a set of
linkages that are not found in the specific entities of corporations,
universities, municipalities, and neighborhoods. Their essential
relation is to the components of the superstructures rather than
to locality. The devices for internal communication assure the
rapid dissemination of new developments. The specification of
standards of conduct and performance provides some minimum

200 : The Reality and the Promise

level definition of responsibilities to co-workers and to the public.
These provide at least a modest check upon the unscrupulous
and rapacious corporation and upon unethical practice in general
In this function, they supplement the concern for the public wel-
fare given expression, for example, in the pure food laws, but
they may also go counter to public opinion in such matters as
medical care of the aged. The agreements reached among the
separate enterprises of a given industry may also be suspected of
contributing to violation of anti-trust laws.

For good or evil, the voluntary association provides the
meeting ground on which divergent and even competitive ele-
ments may seek to reconcile their differences and to define their
common interests. The effect is to give stability to the corporate
system otherwise theoretically possible only through monolithic
state control, but the latter course lends itself to the inflexibility
which has appeared, among other places, in the regulation of the
railroads and is, we believe, a common feature of totalitarian
systems.

CORPORATE ORGANIZATION

The corporation as a form of human organization had its origin
in the medieval period. In England it was used by the kings as
a device to buttress the royal power against that of the feudal
lords and the Church and to meet the new needs of an emerging
nation-state. The flexibility of its social form permitted its suc-
cessful application to a great variety of enterprises. Hence, it is
not surprising that exploitation and settlement of the New
World was advanced through the issuance of royal charters.
In the First and Second Virginia Charters of 1606 and 1609 and
the Massachusetts Charter of 1628 the Crown bestowed political
and economic authority upon tie grantees. In fact public govern-
ment in America was based upon an ordinance of the Virginia
Company of 1621, which became the model for later English
colonies. In this sense the commercial corporation was the
progenitor of the American form of government 1 *

The Corporate Society and Education s 2D1

After the establishment of the Bepublie, and in keeping with
the doctrine o Individual freedom^ the laws governing corpora-
tions were liberalized to extend to individuals the right to
utilize the advantages of corporate organization for private ends
and purposes. In effect government provided the instrument
and laid down the conditions through which individual initiative
was extended to the group. This principle was validated and
strengthened during the last half of the nineteenth century by a
sequence of decisions of the Supreme Court, which called the
corporation a person before the law, hence possessive of the
rights, privileges, and protection accorded to the individual under
the various provisions of the Constitution. Although these deci-
sions have been interpreted as a defense erf property and die
power of great corporations, they may be viewed in another
sense as a radical, perhaps revolutionary addition to the American
doctrine of freedom. The frequent use of corporate power against
the public interest was an almost inevitable consequence of the
freedom corporations acquired by court decision. It enabled
them to move in a variety of directions to meet changing condi-
tion^ allowed them unparalleled growth toward monopoly, and
consequently threatened destruction of the very principles of
American democracy that made corporate freedom possible.
Hence arose the necessity for legislative restraints and govern-
mental encouragement of what Galbcaith calls countervailing
power. 19

The reason for our emphasis upon the business corporation
should be fairly obvious, for the successive stages in the trans-
formation of American society have thus far been mostly in the
direction of eactending the commercial spirit and keeping our
energies and attention fixed upon the production and distribution
of goods. The designation erf our way of life as a business civil-
ization has not been unjustified, and corporate organization has
been the social form through which this has been achieved. 20

Few persons would question the cental position which busi-
ness corporations occupy in American life nor the near imperial-
istic economic power which a few great mammoths possess.

202 : The Reality and the Promise

Numerous studies have presented in detail the overwhelming
proportion of wealth and production concentrated in the hand-
ful of giants. 21 Such analyses have frequently served the purpose
of iHtiminating a variety of problems deriving from the con-
centration of economic power and its effects on competition,
price, and market; on ownership, financing, and control; on
legal restraints, social responsibility, and legitimacy; on ethics
and democratic values; and on the position of the individual in
a corporate society. Conclusions about these problems of juris-
prudence, economics, history, and ethics are achieved through
public debate and reflected in policy and legislation. Although
none of these problems may be ignored, and several have more
than a peripheral interest for us, we have concentrated our at-
tention upon two aspects only: the effect of the corporate system
upon community, and its internal organization and operations.
Both of these are of immediate relevance to the structure and
functioning of the schools which will be examined in the final
section of this chapter.

The Corporations Impact on Community

Intrusion of corporate business enterprise into Main Street
America has weakened the system of local leadership, increased
the proportion of population which is civicly non-participative,
introduced areas of strife between workers and management for
which the mechanisms of solving community problems are in-
adequate, and accelerated the erosion of the capacity of local
community to maintain its autonomy. Those who hold a nostalgic
longing for the past may well count these consequences as the
basis for a serious indictment of corporate society. At the least
they should engender the thoughtful consideration of all of us
who are deeply concerned about the future direction of American
civilization and the on-going transformation of our society.

The unintentional attrition of local community vitality may be
attributed to several factors. Since the declared objective of the
industrial enterprise is the production of goods for profit, con-

The Corporate Society anil Education - 203

cern with community welfare must remain incidental and the
expansion of community services entailing higher taxes Is a
burden to be avoided. The plant is ordinarily not dependent on
the locality for its raw materials nor as a market for its product
Except in the increasingly rare instances of home owned indus-
try, financial and managerial ties are to the outside. Thus, in its
organizational pattern and in its mode of operation, the corpor-
ation transcends the locality. In its supra-community functions its
problems are not at all, or only incidentally, those of the com-
munity. Since its success or failure is partially dependent upon
the favorable combination of raw materials, available labor, and
market, no single enterprise can permit loyalty to community
welfare to override that of decisions based upon business ex-
pediency. The New England owned and operated textile industry
readily abandoned the towns of that region when necessity or
advantage dictated. The owners felt little if any responsibility for
an unemployed population left behind. One vivid account of the
natural history of the transference of control of local industry
into remote hands and its ultimate fate is given in J, P. Mar-
quand's Sincerely, Willis Wayde 2 * A generation earlier, Booth
Tarldngton dramatized in The Magnificent Ambersons 2 ^ the
decline of a towifs first family under the onrushing sweep of
industrialization.

But the bodily transfer of an industrial enterprise from one
locality to another is far less common than the comings and
goings of those who staff the managerial posts in branch plants.
By all rights, these capable and energetic newcomers should
provide a desirable increment to the reservoir of community
leadership, for their outlook and education and the prestige and
power which their positions carry are factors conducive to civic
contribution. Yet the facts are otherwise, and their inability
to exercise leadership creates a lacuna which is not filled from
other sources. 24 To account for this strange state of affairs, it is
necessary to look at the organizational structure of the corpora-
tion.

The group comprising top management, from which leader-

204 ; The Reality and the Promise

ship might be expected, looks to a remote central headquarters,
not the local community, for its rewards. In the competitive race
of **up or out" they cannot afford to become embroiled in con-
troversies that might reflect adversely on their companies. And
community problems inevitably entail controversy. The battle-
ground on which they are at home in their infighting is the
corporation itself; as Cameron Hawley's Executive Suite so con-
vincingly details, it is here that one is tested and proved. 25 Why
should the ambitious executive engage in causes, especially those
involving politics, the outcome of which adds little to his position
and which may seriously jeopardize it? Is not the much safer
course, as Norton Long points out, to ally oneself with the
thoroughly respectable Community Chest, Chamber of Com-
merce, or Red Cross, where the ritualistic performance that is
required offers no threat? 26 He interprets the position of the
corporate manager as being primarily proconsular, the repre-
sentative of a foreign power, and our own analysis would support
this conclusion.

The system which rewards those who are continuously alert
for advancement through transfer does not encourage the sinking
of deep roots in community life. Just as one must earn his right
to leadership in community life, so also must position be won in
corporate organization; neither one can be bestowed. Inevitably
the situation is one of conflicting loyalties in which the com-
munity is most often the loser. The career pattern of the success-
ful aspirant is geared to successive steps upward through the
corporation hierarchy and does not allow sufficiently lengthy
residence in any locality, at least not until the head office is
reached, for full community participation.

Residence in metropolis poses no such problems. One can
accept or reject active participation in child-centered suburban
affairs, or one may sink into anonymity in the urban apartment.
Hie way of Me and pattern of settlement are congenial to those
who dedicate themselves to profession or career. Ancestry and
past performance are reckoned less than present position and

The Corporate Society and Education ; 205

future potentialities. There are no tribal elders to whom homage
must be paid nor from whom reward for merit is received.

Although we have focused upon the business corporation and
its top personnel, our description applies with equal force to
transient members o the military, labor unions, government em-
ployees, and some of the professions. The crag-jumping school
administrator, the itinerant teacher seeking greener pastures,
the career oriented college professor, the aspiring clergyman
together they constitute a vast army of mobile Americans, making
their contributions through the institutions of community but
never really a stable part of it. The vans that shuttle household
effects from locality to locality are familiar sights on the Ameri-
can landscape and inescapable parts of the corporate society.

Those who defend the local community as the bastion of
democracy do not reckon with the relentless extension of metropo-
lis. That which binds all segments of public life, all regions, and
all localities into a vast new American system is only in part
the diffusion of cultural standards and norms of behavior through
the mass media; it is much more the interpenetration of organi-
zational forms that has done so. Even the belief that education
remains a local function proves on careful inspection to be
merely a comforting illusion. State legislatures have long since
placed educational control in state boards and departments of
education, the teaching profession establishes the ethics govern-
ing activities within the classroom, and textbook publishers (in
conjunction with makers of standardized tests) determine the
content of instruction. The interrelations of many different kinds
of corporate organizations public, private (profit and non-
profit), and voluntary professional are seen clearly in their im-
pact on the omnrunity's education. His is typical of comnnmity
life in general.

Internal Organization and Operation

The internal arrangements of the corporation provide an
ingenious mechanism for concentrating human and mechanical

206 : Hie Keality and the Promise

resources, for directing energies toward long-range objectives,
and for eliciting cooperation from a technically and culturally
heterogeneous group. From without, its organization and opera-
tion look neat and orderly, almost a thing of beauty in the
symmetrical arrangement of positions on a personnel chart and
in the precision with which job requirements of each little box
are succinctly described. Its internal departmental and subsec-
tional divisions give expression to the variety of functions and
their relationships. The neatly angled lines that connect each
echelon of descending rows of positions symbolize lines of com-
munication and authority and of prestige and power. This is the
hierarchical pyramid of supervision and coordination startlingly
similar to the chain of command of the traditional army which
Chester Barnard so brilliantly and abstractly dissected in The
Function of the Executive, and other scholars have taken great
pains to define and some to note that it fails to operate in
exactly the way it is conceived. 27

One can but marvel at the demonstrated capacity of the cor-
porate form to organize the technical processes for efficient
productive purposes. Its success, however, may in part be
attributed to the great flexibility accorded the corporation to
meet changes in varied types of conditions, whether these arise
from the surrounding habitat or from internal tensions, and to
exercise some control over its environment through elimination
of competitors or by influencing courts and legislation. This flexi-
bility of action extended to the regulation of its employees
hiring and firing, hours of work, wages, and promotion except
as this autonomy was circumscribed by law or the countervailing
power of the unions. 28 And when people, things, and processes
are instruments of production humanitarian considerations are
either incidental or fortuitous.

F. W. Taylor was one of the first to advocate the utilization
of technical processes to lighten the burden of industrial
drudgery. 29 His proposals were subverted by management to in-
crease production through time-and-motion studies and rate
setting, and hence "TaylorisnT became a term of opprobrium

The Corporate Society and Education : 207

among workers, particularly in Europe. Then, IB the 1920*5 and
*3O*s, Elton Mayo and his associates at the Harvard School of
Business attempted a new tack. Their research led them to a
socio-psychological view of human behavior that challenged as
folklore prevalent notions of motivation based upon concepts of
the economic man, and opened up insights into human organi-
zation which unfortunately have continued to be almost com-
pletely ignored in practice. 30 Organizational research during the
past two decades in industry, hospitals, mental institutions, and
at least one school has established that all is not well behind the
orderly facade of corporate groups. Certain aspects of organiza-
tion produce stultifying effects: they exact an immeasurable
human cost, 31

We may gain some understanding of the tensions in organi-
zational operation by examining two sets of relationships: those
of client and supervisor. The term "client" designates that in-
dividual (or collectivity) which receives goods or services from
an organization or possibly, as in the case of professional advice,
from an individual. The specific label will vary somewhat from
one land of arrangement to another. For example, retailers and
manufacturers deal with customers, railroads serve passengers
and shippers, hospitals treat patients, governments aid citizens,
churches possess communicants, and schools educate pupils.
There may be a client relationship between any two organiza-
tions. When the government, a hospital, a school, or a business
buys goods or services, it is in the client position. The only
exception is the Constitutional provision that prevents organized
religion and government from entering a client relationship,
although the Catholic Church is now attempting to modify this
arrangement by seeking federal aid for its parochial schools
under the guise of labeling the issue a political one. The re-
lationship in education is also a special one because of legal and
social custom, which grants to an educational institution the
role in loco parents & fact that is caudal in understanding the
transitional position of the school between private and public
worlds. Viewed from a different angle, we observe that there are

208 : The Reality and the I"romise

a series of publics, each one of which is served by different
Institutions. We call this the client relationship.

The other major relationship may be labeled "supervisory" and
is entirely internal to the organization. In its simplest form it
represents the relation between the managers and the managed.
In industry it includes the management and the workers; in the
army, officers and enlisted men; in a hospital, the technical and
professional staffs and the patients; in the Indian Bureau, the
administrative staff and the Indians; in the Bureau of Internal
Revenue, the tax collector and the taxpayer; in the schools, the
school staff including administrators, specialists, and teachers
and the child.

The significant aspect of the supervisory relationship is that
one individual or group initiates action for another individual or
group and that the latter is rewarded or punished according to the
response. The person in charge is responsible for making decisions
and giving direction to the enterprise; and in the fulfillment of
Ms duties he must impose limitations of action through regula-
tions, coordinate individuals and functions, and issue direct
orders. Intermediate personnel receive and transmit these in-
structions and inevitably in the process interpret and modify the
action in relation to the immediate situation. Ultimately, the
flow of action reaches the outer limit of the organization, its
lowest echelon. The army private is told to pack his gear; the
hospital patient receives an injection; the typist copies a manu-
script; the worker changes his operation; the student writes an
examination. In very few instances does this lowest man have
any opportunity to participate in the decision of what, how, or
when he is to act. Nor is it his prerogative to question why.

In certain types of institutions, the restrictions placed upon the
individual are intensified through the exercise of custodial func-
tions. These are exhibited in their most extreme form in prisons
and insane asylums, collectivities which show least evidence in
our society of modification in the direction of the corporate
form. In these, the absorption of the inmate within the super-
visory system is nearly absolute. Even "free time" is rigidly con-

The Corporate Society and Education : 209

trolled. Much less apparent are the custodial functions of a
government agency, except in the rare instances of a Los Alamos
or Oak Ridge under wartime conditions, or on an Indian reserva-
tion. In industry, except in the instance of a company town, the
custodial function is ininimal and restricted to the point of
operation, the factory. In the nuclear family parents exercise
custodial responsibility for children and pets.

The custodial function is not a necessary attribute of organi-
zation, and in certain types of institutions the client and super-
visory relationships are merged. If we plotted types of organi-
zations along a continuum expressing the degree of custodial
responsibility extended to either inmates or the supervised, we
would find business corporations and certain government agencies
(e.g., the Weather Bureau, the SEC, and the U.S. Office of
Education) at one end, and schools, prisons, hospitals, orphan-
ages, and insane asylums at the other. When we ask what
reason may be advanced to account for the difference, our atten-
tion is directed to the extent to which there is a coalescence of
the client and the supervisory relationships, as in the roles of
pupil, patient, orphan, and prisoner. The special public served
by each special type of institution becomes the managed, with
consequent severe limitations upon freedom of action. (Business
monopoly would achieve the same effect.) But in the case of
the schools the adverse effects of institutionalizatioa are
ameliorated by the countervailing influence of the parental re-
lation to the child and by the effect of the educative process, the
goal of which is the development of the child's capacities.

Now to what extent are the supervisory and the educative
functions of the school contradictory? Until about 1890 rigid
discipline and learning ware linked in agrarian classrooms, but
the educative process was always paramount as the ideal ob-
jective. In contrast, in the urban blackboard jungle the pretense
for learning is subordinate to tie need for order* Admittedly, the
ritual of teaching and learning is still observed in most schools,
but adverse consequences lie ahead if the process of bureaucrati-
zatioii aMtiaues. Evidence from research in other organizations

210 ; The Reality and the Promise

may help us to formulate the problem and determine the direc-
tion and the danger.

That all is not well behind the organizational facade finds ex-
pression in such popular sayings as "the rat race" or *Tm just
serving time/' in the apparently irrational but applauded be-
havior of the bus driver who can't take it any more and heads
for Florida with his bus, or in the more serious instance of
the person who walks out on job and family, and disappears,
and in the deep concern among those intellectuals who speculate
on the meaning and purpose of modern life.

It is time that all of us should be concerned because the
manner in which we operate our organizational system subverts
the principles of individual freedom and human dignity. The
chain of command, inert bureaucracy, and excessive supervision
belong to the horse and buggy days; they are the antediluvian
relics of a period preceding the contemporary complexity of
interdependent functions. Please note we are not condemning
the corporate form. It permitted a flexibility and freedom of
action absolutely essential for our national development. What
we protest is the failure to extend the same principles of action
to the internal operation. As a consequence, a heavy burden of
responsibility has been placed upon a small managerial and
professional elite, and the great mass of the population has been
denied the full contribution of their talents to the public welfare.

Some measure of the magnitude of this debilitating effect
upon the individual, and indirectly upon the organization, has
been revealed by research in industry. These have been col-
lated by Argyris, who comes to the conclusion that the needs
of the individual and organization are incongruent 32 In the
adjustment between the two, the worker is the one who has
been forced into an adaptive posture, often becoming apathetic
or hostile and feeling a wide gulf between himself and those
in control. Self-protective activity takes the form of restriction
of output, informal and extraorganizational controls, and in ex-
treme cases, sabotage. The response of management is to in-
tensify the procedures which created the original situation, and

The Corporate Society and Education : 211

hence to exacerbate the dependent, submissive, and passive feel-
ings. Other research, however, reveals a situation In which the
plant is viewed by the workers as a point of vitally significant
activity and a refuge from a barren and meaningless community
Me. 33 It is not mere coincidence that one of the bitterest and most
prolonged strikes in labor history was against a company, I.e.*
Kohler of Kohler, whose management was also one of the most
paternally beneficent.

The evidence is clear. HI effects flow from the concentration
of freedom of action in the hands of a few and its denial to
the many. The problem which now confronts us is to examine
the relevance of school organization to the corporate form and
to the function of education in our type of civilization.

SCHOOL ORGANIZATION AND THE EDUCATIVE FHOCESS

We have reserved -until now full consideration of the second
of the two questions we posed at the beginning of this chapter.
We explained there that only after some understanding of the
organizational revolution that has transformed America has
been achieved would It then be possible to assess the conse-
quences for the process of education and the organization of
the schools.

The organizational correspondence between the schools in
metropolis and the other superstructures should by now have
become increasingly apparent to those who know school opera-
tion. Bureaucratizatiott, internal specialization, elaboration of a
hierarchy of coordination,, centralization of authority in a mana-
gerial elite, and expansion of activities are all characteristics
resembling other corporate systems. Even some of the language
and imagery of industrial organisation has been taken up by
educators who talk of packaged programs and view end results
as products.

Despite the protestations of the professional educator (usually
a non-teaching specialist ) that each child be hand-crafted in
terms of his individual needs, the process more nearly resembles

212 : The Reality and the Promise

an assembly line operation in which a conveyor belt receives the
roughly stamped bodies at one end, and after modifications and
additions delivers them as finished products at the other. 34 (The
temptation to draw further comparisons by allusions to chrome
plating, body trim, and tail fins must be resisted.) The conscious
or unconscious aping of the industrial process in education, based
upon coordination of men, machines, and materials in technical
procedures, can only subvert the educative process. Unfortunately
the malady from which the schools of metropolis seem to suffer
results from just this kind of affliction. Yet the causes are easy to
diagnose.

In an earlier America the one-room country school was an ex-
tension of the family, and in the towns schools were an ex-
pression of community. But to what social segments may we say
the public schools of metropolis are related? To parents? Pro-
fessional experts and bureaucratic organization have effectively
blocked most avenues of participation. To business corporations?
They have long since declared their position by opposition to
federal appropriations for education and by their implied re-
sistance to increased taxes at the local level. To churches? They
are barred by law from direction or control, although some
Protestant groups have vigorously defended public education.
To universities, or even to teachers colleges? They have pro-
claimed an academic and professional aloofness. To voluntary
associations? Groups composed of public-spirited citizens and
professional educators have attempted to bring educational
advances and prevent the worst abuses, but whatever their in-
fluence, their role does not include responsibility.

The obvious relation is to an elected or appointed school
board, presumably representative of the public. But, in fact, is
not the board's position comparable to that of the directors of
a corporation, who at times act in the interests of the government
from which the corporation received its charter, of the clients
who buy the firm's products, of the stockholders, of the em-
ployees, or of the management to which they have delegated
operational responsibility? But the significant relation is between

The Corporate Society and Education : 213

the directors and the management 35 This is also true with our
schools. Under such an arrangement the ties to parents, com-
munity, and other groups are tenuous. In actuality school opera-
tion is a projection of an educational bureaucracy composed of
administrators, specialists, and clerical workers. Theoretically
and ideally these personnel serve the teaching functions; in
practice they may actually hinder it.

In American schools the educative process is being increasingly
subordinated to the necessities of administration and coordina-
tion. Particularly flagrant in the large cities, but nowhere absent,
the growth of educational bureaucracy is justified under the
rationale of providing the auxiliary services necessary for tie
classroom teacher to do his job. It is seriously questionable,
however, whether the intended effect is being realized. It seems
more likely that teachers are under increasing pressures from
above, which in turn they transmit to the students. A good deal
of indirect evidence and at least some research support the
conclusion that the teacher-student relationship has been trans-
formed into one resembling that of the foreman-worker in in-
dustry, 30

Teachers no longer possess the autonomy with which they once
conducted their classes. Discipline problems which were once
settled between teacher and student, or in exceptional cases
taken to the principal or parents, have now been institutionalized
in guidance officers; and they may eventually reach the school
psychologist. The numerous specialists in techniques and subject
matter maintain close surveillance of classroom activity. Their
professional expertise gives them a decided advantage in recom-
mending or installing modifications in the curriculum. Auxiliary
personnel in health, social problems, or recreation intrude in
the learning process and fragment teacher-student relationships.
School-wide examinations are prepared at the central office
in the remote state capital or in Princeton, New Jersey; they
force the teacher to adhere closely to prepared lesson plans, and
they create a tension in learning as students are crammed with
facts to insure a good showing. Parents, with high hopes for

2i_4 The Reality and the Promise

admission of their children to prestige colleges, add directly or
indirectly to the burden of pressure as they point to the barrier
of College Entrance Board examinations. These being the facts
of life, the tendency is to accept them as normal. Only the
socially impoverished apparently remain ignorant of ? or indif-
ferent to, the necessity of formal education for those seeking to
secure any decent Mud of status in our society. At least that is
one explanation educators offer to explain the failure of a large
proportion of their school population to give serious attention to
learning. (In New York City one-third of the students become
truancy cases each year.) Is it possible that other factors are also
contributory?

Research in industry has revealed that apathy, rejection, and
sabotage derive from the operation of a system that denies men
freedom. When there is no investment, there can be no commit-
ment Our type of society requires an educational system in
which the schools function as a transitional structure for children
as they move from the private and personal world of the nuclear
family into positions in the public world of the superstructures.
This requirement is impossible to achieve within an organiza-
tional form in which the supervisory relationship is dominant. 37
Learning of the sort we require can occur only where there is
freedom and autonomy.

Earlier we advocated that in order for students (and teachers)
to engage fully in the educative process the solution is to place
the organizational structure at their service and thus release them
from custodial and supervisory restrictions. If the principles
implicit in the corporate system of organi2ation are applied, this
objective can be achieved.

The possibilities for freedom and initiative which the corporate
form permits have never been realized, much less adequately
understood. Neither the supervisory relationship, bureaucracy,
nor the custodial function are essential ingredients of corporate
organization. But the principle of freedom of action to adjust
and to modify the environment for corporate purposes is. The
utilization of this principle in groups requires the exercise of

The Corporate Society and Education : 215

coordination and leadership. These qualities are needed to assure
a situation in which each individual and subgroup knows its
relation to the others in pursuit of a common objective. Such a
system does not assure any necessary reduction in tension, but
it does provide the channels and procedures by which these can
be resolved. Ultimately it extends to each unit a measure of
freedom equivalent to that which is enjoyed by the corporate
whole. The alternative is the purely mechanical arrangement
which now prevails.

Only in an environment of freedom and autonomy can the
educative process function.

With this chapter we conclude the description of America and
its transformation. Our goal has been to convey an understand-
ing of the present and of its relation to the past and to insist
that those solutions which once served us well can no longer
cope with the problems that lie ahead. The perpetual tension
which arises from the conflicting demands of public and private
worlds exacts its toll from all. All those who join that company
for whom belief in the great adventure persists must be pre-
pared to bear the costs which dedication to the promise requires.
But this time we cannot permit ourselves the luxury of illusions
about our system or about ourselves. For us, the only course
open depends almost completely upon what can and must be
accomplished through education. But a philosophy of education
which takes no account of the txmimtments which our society
requires seems particularly useless. For that reason in the next
several chapters we propose to determine first what is meant
when we speak of commitment and then to apply this under-
standing to several aspects of American life. Finally, we shall
propose what we believe our educational system must be and do.

PART TWO

EDUCATION

AND

COMMITMENT

10

THE

NATURE
OF COMMITMENT:

A

COMPARATIVE
APPROACH

In an age that has made anthropology one of its more f ashional
academic disciplines., it is not very difficult to gain verbal ass<
to the proposition that commitment is more a matter of soc
structure than of internal feeling tones of individuals. But I
full acceptance of that proposition, along with the consequent
for education that follow from it, is quite another matter;
there are many influences that subtly push our conceptions
the other direction. Our legal system operates on the assumpt
that the basic causes of individual behavior are within 1
pearson, else he could not be held responsible for his actio
According to the myth that underlies the constitutions of (
various state governments and federal government, poHti
decisions are made ultimately by individual citizens, each
isolated figure protected from afl outside influences by the ws
of the voting booth. When our economic system outgrew

220 : Education and Commitment

chrysalis of individual entrepreneurship, we did not surrender
the idea of individualism in business enterprise; instead we
established the fiction that a corporation was a full-fledged
individual person, with all the legal rights a person possesses
under the Constitution. We even individualized our mental
image of General Motors, for example, and treated the growth
of such a corporation as though it represented a triumph of one
individual's initiative in competition with other individuals.

The unasserted metaphors within our language itself conspire
to perpetuate these myths; thus educationists can scarcely escape
speaking (and what's really disastrous, acting) as though tie
abstract noun intelligence referred to some quality or property
present in varying amounts inside the cranium of each child
equally with the word commitment. We can believe that commit-
ment comes from the outside, as it were, but when asked about
the "nature" as opposed to the "cause" of commitment, our lan-
guage almost forces us to think of it as we do of intelligence;
that is, commitment is some sort of "stuff," a possession that
everyone ought to have inside of him in as large a quantity as
possible.

Recognizing all of these forces that tend to make us visualize
commitment as an internal property of individuals, we ask our
readers to allow us to describe two social systems other than
our own other systems in which the relation of commitment
and social structure may be seen more clearly than it can be
in the detailed complexity of the contemporary scene. In these
societies, as in our own, we may well say of an individual that
he is committed to some goal or value, but when we say this
of an Irish farmer or a Navaho shepherd, we recognize im-
mediately that what we are talking about is not an internal
property of that individual, but rather a feature of a social
system. 1

IRISH FAMUJSM

The agrarian system of the small farmers of Ireland can be
understood only within the context of familism. The routine

Hie Jtfature of Commitment ; 221

activities of daily Me, the progression of the individual from
birth to death, and generational succession are all firmly em-
bedded in a set of values and represented by symbols which
provide goals and give meaning to the course of life. Briefly, it
is a system which organizes die relations between male and
female and between the generations and assures the continuity
of the family and its name on the land. The central event in
the perpetuation of the family is matchmaking, consisting of a
number of steps which eventually lead to the establishment of
a new family, and to the transference of farm ownership into its
custody. 2

The bride joins her husband's household and the newly
married pair now embark on a career which carries them through
a succession of events resembling those of the generations which
preceded them. Initially, de facto control of household and farm
operation might still reside in the old couple who continue their
residence in the dwelling into which the new woman enters as
daughter-in-law, and hopefully, as mother of heirs not yet born.
Often the process of establishment of the new family is accom-
panied by tension between the generations, as when fear of
displacement by the old may make them reluctant to give up
their position of ascendancy. For although the customs govern-
ing the procedures and obligations of all persons involved in this
process are widely known and ordinarily observed, there are
occasions when parents fail in their responsibilities or circum-
stances that prevent the realization of clearly accepted objectives.

An explanation of the degree of commitment to family by the
small farmer leads us in two directions. One is the system as it
works contemporaneously. There we discover that full manhood
and womanhood, the goal of individuals within the system, can-
not be achieved except as those who carry these qualities join
together as procreating members of a society in a specifically
allotted space the farm to form a community. Second is the
nature of the relationships between members of the family. There
we discover that within the daily, seasonal, and yearly activities
is a division of function (based upon age and sex) which ex-
presses the corporate whole. The activities and sentiments of

222 : Education and Commitment

each member are congruent with the structure of family relation-
ships and thus, from analysis of the dynamic present, we may
infer the social source of the commitments which are manifested
in individual lives as routine duties are carried out or as the
exigencies of life are met. One of us was actually witness to the
following instance, which may serve as an example.

One dreary January day the old woman from a nearby farm
burst into the neighboring cottage to complain that her children
wanted to turn her out "upon the road/* as she put it. There was
little need for her to elaborate upon the details of the story,
not alone because her neighbors already knew her life story,
but also because the context from which she spoke was a
familiar one. Hers was the difficult and sometimes tragic situa-
tion which the old of Ireland face when the time has come for
them to clear the house of the remaining adult sons and daughters
and to bring a new woman into the house to be the wife of their
son. In this instance the old had delayed too long. The remaining
son and daughter were already well into their thirties. The old
woman as well as her neighbors knew that the time was overdue
when provision of a dowry for the girl and land and wife for
the boy should have been accorded to them, and that the day
could not be put off, for both the old woman and her husband
were under increasing pressures to arrange a match. The facts
themselves, however, are not sufficient to explain the particular
phraseology she used to express her anxiety. Yet another aspect
of Irish familism needs to be described before we can under-
stand her fear.

In the contract which is executed at the time of marriage there
is a clause which reserves certain rights for the old couple for
the period of their natural lives. These include the use of a
specific bedroom, the right to sit by the hearth, the provision of
a quantity of fuel and food, and often the payment of an annual
token sum of money. It would seem that in a family system as
tight as that which characterizes the Irish such precautions are
unnecessary. Certainly, the ties based upon blood, as well as
upon respect for the aged and the preservation of one's good

The Nature of Commitment ; 223

name in the community, would seem to preclude the danger of
familial disruption. But in reality these provisions are inserted
to protect against the very factors which hold the family together
and insure its perpetuation. If for any reason any person, even
one within the family, threatens the generational progression,
then that person must go, and even the protection of the con-
tract is sometimes insufficient to insure against this. In times of
stress old couples have been turned out of their homes, with
only the county poorhouses as a haven in which to die. The
old couple has the power to resist the entreaties, pressures, and
threats to give up the land, but the children may use devices to
force the issue.

One of these devices is for a girl to have her "character" de-
stroyed. If this happens, her entire family feels shame, and its
reputation is lowered in the community. Some of the moral con-
demnation also extends to the boy and to his family. The family
attempts to prevent, at all costs, any such circumstance. The
Catholic Church regards such action with horror, and condemns
it as a mortal sin. Thus, on all sides, one finds the strongest
possible sanctions against those who transgress the puritanical
sexual code. (It should be noted that the same restrictions do
not operate among landless agricultural laborers. ) Yet there are
situations in which young couples will threaten to violate all of
the prohibitions and to make their action public. They will do
so in order to force the girl's parents to provide a dowry and
those of the boy to relinquish the land. The young people know
that the fear of family shame may be enough to win their goal.
But if the families are adamant, the alternative the young couple
faces is to accept defeat and to wait for such time as the parents
decide to arrange a marriage or, on the other hand, to make good
their threat and accept the consequences. These are severe. They
are disinherited and in their sinful state the Church denies them
communion. They must seek refuge in the poor laborers' section
of the town or in a foreign country. The rules governing the
establishment of new procreative landholding f amilies must be

224 : Education and Commitment

observed. Cohabitation outside the rules is rejected by church,
state, and community.

Another aspect of f amilism that of the linkage between family
and land further illuminates the nature of the commitment. One
of the continuously occurring acts of violence which the Irish
countryside experiences is called the "agrarian outrage." Many
of these are in the pattern of the vendetta, or feud, and have
their origins in disputes over land, cattle, or family status. The
outrage is usually perpetuated by stealth at night. It takes many
forms, the most common of which is the maiming or killing of
animals, particularly cattle, the burning of hay, destruction of
fences, or firing of a gun through a window into a house. If
personal harm is intended, an ambush is used. Although each
victim promptly reports the offense to the police, he remains
curiously ignorant of the offenders' identities, and prosecutions
are rare. Previous or subsequent activities establish pretty clearly
to police and outsiders who is involved and, of course, the local
residents are completely informed, if uninformative, as to the
participants and their motives.

Many of the quarrels are based on conflicting claims over fence
lines. According to reports the area involved may be only a few
square feet, but feelings are deep and tempers are short. Hostility
between families may be generated by some real or imagined
injustice connected with the fulfillment of obligations in con-
nection with the marriage contract, or where inheritance or suc-
cession to the land is involved. In one such instance two old
bachelors had been cared for by their niece, and when it be-
came apparent that they either had no intention of, or were lax
in, passing the land to her, their house was fired into by the girl's
brothers. In a slightly different case the son of a widow who
had sold the land to a town shopkeeper fired into the latter's
house. By this threat he hoped to force the relinquishment of
the land so that he might possess it.

Land hunger has for generations been a dominant cause of
many of the disturbances in Ireland. Although in psychological
terms it might be explained as greed or compulsion, the full

The Nature of Commitment : 225

meaning of its emotional expression must be sought in the identi-
fication between the "name on the lancT and the family which
that name represents. To preserve or destroy one is to preserve
or destroy the other. Both family and land must be defended
with equal intensity, for they are identical

The glimpse into the earliest period of Celtic history reveals a
family system exhibiting many similarities with the present.
There were extensive obligations binding Jdndred together under
the leadership of a clan chieftain. The clan had territorial identity
which necessitated frequent skirmishes to protect clan lands.
Little, if any, of this ancient past remains as folk history, although
a modern school system disseminates some of it through textbook
learning. But a great deal of recent history constitutes a living
memory connecting past and present. Much of this is in the con-
text of the struggle against British overlordship and the land
wars which eventually destroyed the plantation system and left a
rural population of small holders.

In little more than a century the rural Irish have experienced
the great famine of 1845 and subsequent dispersal and decline
of the population and the land wars beginning in 1870 with
boycott, eviction, violence, and eventual land purchase acts.
Finally, the rise of Irish political and cultural nationalism culmi-
nated in the "troubles" at the end of the First World War and
the establishment of a virtually independent nation. These were
events in which small farmer, clergy, and political leader found
common cause against the enemy, be he landlord, Protestant, or
Sassenach. Out of these disturbances there emerged triumphant
the right of the occupier to his acres and security to the Irish
family thereon. If stress is a prerequisite to commitment, the
struggle and sacrifice of this period may help explain the im-
press which the pattern of small farmer life laid upon Ireland
to this day.

Whether we turn to culture history or draw upon the dynamics
of family life in the present, we are impressed with the degree
to which both supported and defined the nature of commitment.
Family activities were founded in community tradition and sup*

226 : Education and Commitment

ported by both supernatural and secular sanctions of Church
and State. In most instances the powerful alignment of custom
and supporting institutions were sufficient to assure the smooth
functioning of the family and its generational transition. But
when conditions which could not be corrected intervened, there
was recourse to actions contrary to prescriptions and injunctions
of both Church and State, as well as to customary procedure.
Individuals sometimes engaged in activities that were labeled
immoral, illegal, or sacrilegious to attain their ends. Normal con-
straints became inoperative in the face of the necessity felt by
the individual to fulfill the commitments inherent in particular
ways of life. With the Irish countryman these included the reali-
zation of full productive., directing, and procreating adulthood
within the context of family and land. Our point is that since
commitment is socially derived, its power overrides all other
considerations, even those which themselves appear to he socially
based. Although this condition may appear to be a paradox, in
fact it is not. Each social arrangement requires its own commit-
ments and these must be congruent with the symbols which
express them.

Confusion may arise out of the failure to separate the instru-
ments for commitment institutions and things from the ends
themselves. Church and State, even family and land, should be
viewed as instrumental arrangements., or objects, which facilitate
the realization of goals. When absoluteness is claimed for the
symbols and coercive sanctions are applied for their maintenance,
the harmonious concordance within the relations among persons
and with things and their symbolic representation has been de-
stroyed. The use of the instruments to force conformance inevit-
ably leads to serious disturbances in personal behavior and also
in the relations among men.

The commitments which support Irish rural f amilism are be-
ginning to weaken only because of the conditions within which
it operates. For neither poverty nor the repressive measures of
English overlordship have been able to destroy it. But the in-

The Nature of Commitment: : 227

fluenees of the new urban industrialism are gradually modifying
and replacing the older way.

NAVAHO REALITY AND SYMBOLISM

The Navaho Indians were aboriginal occupants of northern
New Mexico and Arizona, a region possessing a plateau desert
environment When first encountered by Spanish explorers, they
depended upon hunting, gathering, and a simple garden agri-
culture for their subsistence. A small cluster of families, probably
an extended kinship group, lived together. The major European
contribution to their way of life was the introduction of domesti-
cated animals. This innovation brought a number of marked
cultural changes, in particular, permitting and enforcing expan-
sion over a much wider territory as their flocks and herds grew
and the population increased. Livestock also increased the eco-
nomic security and strengthened the position of women, who
came to hold the major proprietary interest in the flocks, for
upon them fell the responsibility for their care. 3

Within the present-day reservation, clusters of related families
occupy, and graze their sheep in, traditionally established areas.
Since descent is through the female side and residence is ma-
trilocal, there exists a powerful connection between a family
lineage and its territory, in most instances extending backward
over several generations. Ties of blood link a woman with her
sisters, their mother and her sisters, their common grandmother,
and their own children. Since husbands come from other family
lineages, and brothers and sons marry out, the continuity of land,
property, livestock, and name is assured through the female line.
Together the families constitute a corporate whole which co-
operates in endeavors requiring communal effort. In such enter-
prises the sons-in-law must respond to the direction of their wife's
father. In fact he maintains a dose and critical scrutiny of their
behavior, and if a son-in-law proves unsatisfactory in any one
of several respects, he will be sent packing. Tension between
mother-in-law and son-in-law is reduced somewhat by the

22S : Education and Commitment

mother-in-law taboo which proscribes direct contact between
the two. Dissatisfaction on her part can lead to indirect inter-
vention and a breaking of the marriage. In this type of family
arrangement it is the male who experiences continued insecurity.
He must constantly respond to the demands of others, be always
ready to prove his own qualities in whatever kind of task or
mission is required of him, and even if he is responsible and
industrious, he remains subject to what he may consider ca-
pricious behavior. Eventually he will succeed to the position of
having married daughters and will exercise the same scrutiny
and direction of their husbands to which he was formerly subject.

The education which the Navaho youth receives instructs him
in the hazards of life and what he must do to overcome them.
From his father, grandfather, and uncles he obtains advice and
training, and from the medicine men who recite the mythological
tales of heroes of the past he learns of the acquisition and use of
supernatural power. His education is only partially, and perhaps
incidentally, related to his role as husband and father; rather it
prepares him to prove his male adulthood through the acquisition
and use of power in the service of others. For him it is a never-
ending quest requiring obedience, responsibility, and endurance
to withstand hardship.

The young Navaho is taught that the true path of life is a
straight one, filled with beauty and harmony, and that prosperity
comes to him who has acquired certain supernatural gifts which
provide protection and power. He is taught that several courses
are open to him in his efforts to prove his capabilities to others.
He might set his life in the direction of becoming a farmer, or
concentrate on livestock, or apprentice himself to a medicine
man to learn the chants and ceremonies, and in a former day
he might have aspired toward becoming a tribal leader. Which-
ever course he chooses, others will stand ready to assist him
in acquiring the necessary knowledge and skill, but the effort
must be primarily his own, under the guidance and leadership
of the one who has accepted responsibility for his training. There
is no insistence that a boy is limited to one career, nor having

The Nature of Commitment : 229

made a choice, is there assurance of success. Girls are not barred
from such decisions, although the Bomber who set such goals
for themselves is extremely limited.

There is an additional area of cultural behavior which is
relevant to our analysis and which we should examine. Many
societies ritually observe the transition from childhood to adult-
hood by ceremonies which have been labeled puberty rites. 4
Such ceremonies may or may not coincide with physical evidences
of maturity, although the easily accepted explanation is that
they do mark a change in the physical condition. Among the
neighboring Zuni Indians, a town-dwelling agricultural people,
as well as among the Navaho, ceremonies prepare the young to
participate in ceremonials without danger of spiritual harm.
The real initiation for the Zuni, however, comes during puberty,
at which time he is inducted into a tribal society of all adult
males, who jointly are responsible for the dances of the masked
gods, that is, the performance of the ceremonies that control
life. Male adulthood is thus equated with the acceptance of the
mysteries to reveal them is to die of the supernatural in a
ceremony in which the dancing gods claim the initiated to be
one with them. The induction of the youth is required and be-
comes public knowledge. There is no escape from its conse-
quences, which are primarily those of continued participation
in sacred ritual with all the accompanying sacrifices and obliga-
tions which this entails. 5

Navaho culture presents a pattern of some contrast. As each
girl reaches physiological maturity, as evidenced by her first
menses, she undergoes a four-day ceremony in which the qualities
of womanhood are given emphasis. Upon its conclusion she
joins the ranks of female adulthood as a junior member, with
consequent changes in her behavior. For the boy there is no
comparable observance. Even marriage does not release him
from a subordinate status nor confer full manhood upon him.
The relative ease with which Navaho traditionally dissolve their
marriage ties, a decision most often resting with the young man's
mother-in-law or father-in-law, is testimony to the insecurity of

230 : Education and Commitment

the younger male, even in his domestic life. It is also indicative
o the relatively minimized significance of the male role within
the purely domestic aspects of the household. The male wins
status not within the family, but through his capacities as a
representative of the family in the larger world. As agriculturist^
medicine man, or leader he can and must excel. Recognition
has to be won from, and bestowed by, others. The way to female
commitment is precise and automatic and Navaho culture con-
tains within it the devices for its perpetuation through female
culture, almost irrespective of male activity. It is not fortuitous-
that Navaho men sometimes jokingly refer to themselves as-
studs.

Earlier we made the point that one of the prerequisites for
commitment is a system of symbols through which an individual
can identify himself and interpret the behavior of others and
the conditions which surround him. It was not feasible to attempt
an analysis of the function of symbolism for the Irish small
farmers. Christianity is not indigenous to Ireland, and the gen-
eralized interpretation of Christian symbolism is not completely-
applicable to a culture which still retains such deep cultural ties
with an ancient pagan past. The situation with the Navaho iss
otherwise. Here is no seriously disturbing cultural intrusion, so*
that such congruency as exists between human relationships
and cultural practice and mythological belief is readily deter-
mined. Fortunately, an excellent thematic analysis of the ex-
planatory myths of the Chantway ceremonies, the set of major
rituals, has been made by Katherine Spencer. 6 Her findings
demonstrate a startling correspondence between the social reality
and the mythological belief.

The myths which she examines explain how certain ceremonies
were obtained from supernatural beings. They detail how an
earthling hero overcomes great obstacles to obtain ritual control
over supernatural forces and how the hero then utilizes his
achievement in the service of the people.

Her accounts show considerable iinifonnity of plot construe-

The Nature of Commitment : 231

tion from myth to myth. Repeatedly the hero finds himself in a
tense situation involving relations with Ms father, some other
member of Ms family, or with his father-in-law. Or he may have
violated some taboo, entered forbidden territory, or got himself
into trouble with the supernatural. A combination of mishaps
may have made him restless, dissatisfied, or forced him to desert
his surroundings. The separation from his original condition is
then followed by a series of misadventures in which he is con-
stantly threatened by powerful forces from the outside. He is
attacked, rendered helpless, or captured; he suffers disease or is
ridiculed and abandoned. Supernatural beings rescue him from
these predicaments, and through their good will and help he
learns how to protect himself, and most important, how to reach
those supernatural beings who hold great power. After further
hardships and rebuffs he obtains supernatural power for future
use, in most cases the ceremony used by the gods to restore him
to health. Thus he returns to his family where he is joyously re-
ceived, and he brings as gift the supernatural powers which he
acquired and which he now teaches to others. The significant
point in his welcome and his behavior is that he has proved his
adulthood. His full adult status is evident in his active self-
assertion, his independence, his responsibility, in his having
learned discipline and responsible participation, in his ability to
establish himself successfully in marriage, and in his changeover
from exclusive concern with his own problems to the use of his
power in the service of others.

The richness of Miss Spencer's detail is excluded from this brief
summary, but the degree of correspondence between myth and
reality is precise. The course of life for the Navaho male is one
of difficulty and hardship, but it is one he must follow in order to
achieve adulthood. Unlike the Irish, this is not a condition to be
found within the family but in the context of continuous struggle.
Wealth and power are instramentaHties, not ends; they prove
achievement for the individual only to the degree that their use
redounds to the betterment of alL

232 ; Education and Commitment

CONFLICT AND COMMITMENT;
CLAIMANT, SPONSOK, SYMBOL

Let us now return to our original claim that commitment must
be sought, not in the inmost heart of individuals, but in the de-
tails of social relations, particularly in those relations that create
stress and friction among individuals. But commitment can be
inferred, and only from a particular type of event in which there
is a conscious effort to achieve some goal. We saw, for example,
that the familism of the small farmers of Ireland is the source for
the significant commitments of this group, for the entry to full
adulthood, in either a male or female sense, is achieved only
through marriage and acquisition of title to the family farm.
Historically, the Irish peasantry won rights to permanent tenure
through the sacrifices made during the period of land wars
when control was wrested from the landlords. Currently, pos-
session is ensured through resistance to any encroachment, and
the occasional appearance of "agrarian outrages'* are manifesta-
tions of response to such threats. The orderly transfer of the land
from generation to generation is accomplished through "match-
making" and the establishment of the new couple within the
household. But the older generation of parents is often reluctant
to initiate the process which leads to their loss of control and
inclusion of a new younger woman as daughter-in-law. If the
parents fail to initiate the process of transferring the land, there
is little that others can do to force them. The grown children
may, directly or indirectly, through relatives or the parish priest
or, supernaturally, through prayers for intercession to some saint
or the Virgin Mary attempt to force the old ones into action. All
of these measures failing, the recourse of the desperate is to
shame the family through open defiance of the wishes of their
parents, the mores of the community, and the supernatural sanc-
tions of the church by open cohabitation. Through such action
they become adults in the procreating sense alone, and they face
the dire threat of disinheritance and excommunication. Thus com-
mitment can be seen to originate in conflict, in the behavior of

The Nature of Commitment : 233

a claimant who is at once forced to strive for a goal and, at the
same time, frustrated in Ms efforts to achieve it. Although the
specifics for the Navaho are vastly different, this generalization
which emerged from the Irish is equally applicable. The pattern
of action is clearly expressed in a number of mythological tales
which recount the experiences of a tribal hero. A young man
(only rarely a woman) is discontented, restless, or experiences
stress in his family relations. He departs from the household, and
in a series of episodes is subject to frustrations, threats, and
dangers. The correspondence between the mythological tales and
symbolic representation of commitment and the actual cultural
condition which Navaho male youths face in their traditional
culture is remarkable. Both in myth and reality the youth must
prove himself in the course of life through deeds. The acquisition
of sacred ritual or of wealth and respect are evidences of the
success. In both there are difficulties to be overcome and sacrifices
to be made. As in myth, so in actuality: the same set of circum-
stances that force the youth to strive for certain goals and rewards
also seem almost perversely to prevent his achieving them.

To be a claimant, then, is not enough to effect full commitment.
For the Irish couple who take the dramatic course of unsanctioned
cohabitation, and fortunately they are few, the sacrifice is in vain
if there is no sponsor and symbolic sanctioning. From this we
learn that commitment cannot be realized alone, nor does it arise
from within one's self. That course leads to tragedy. There is, of
course, tragedy of another sort awaiting those who never become
claimants for full adulthood. The cottages of rural Ireland are
filled with aged spinsters and bachelors, brothers and sisters
whose parents made no provision for their marriage. Their pas-
sivity, or if they were demanding, the strength of the parents'
refusal to act, has condemned them to a social existence less than
complete, for they are not and can never become husbands or
wives, join the community of elders, and through parenthood en-
sure the passage of the land through generations. If commitment
is to be brought to full fruition, Irish parents must also sacrifice

234 : Education and Commitment

their own position and serve as sponsor to the claims of the next
generation.

Likewise for the achievement of commitment through conflict
in the Navaho youth, by his own unaided efforts he is helpless
against the forces that beset him. In mythology he eventually
acquires a supernatural protector who advises where and how
he may acquire power from remote supernatural beings. His first
approaches are rejected, but with the help of his sponsor he is
finally admitted to the presence of these beings and learns from
them the rituals which assure his success. He then returns to the
earth people, is honored for his achievements, and uses his power
in the service of others. In time he teaches the ceremonies to
another, usually a younger brother, and finally departs to take
up permanent residence among the supernaturals.

In actual life, as In the mythological, there is a debt to be dis-
charged to the sponsor. Those who are lazy or irresponsible, or
who find no one to help them along the way, do not acquire
wealth and power and cannot serve their people. This service
expresses more than the personal obligation owed by the youth-
ful claimant to his sponsor; through its complex representation
in symbolic myths this service transcends its backward look
toward one*s sponsor's past favors and turns toward the future,
and toward the welfare of the entire social group. Thus for the
Navahos commitment, through symbolic extension, becomes some-
thing more than a mere relation of debt and debtor. Does this
same symbolic extension of concrete social obligations occur in
commitment as a feature of Irish familism? Exactly; among the
Irish the ultimate commitment is found in the mythological ideal,
the Holy Family, composed of Joseph, the Virgin Mary, and her
Son, Jesus. A Mother's sacrifice of her Son and the Son's self-
sacrifice for all mankind mitigate and transform the conflicts of
claimants and resisting forces in the bleak Irish countryside.

Although the supernatural, mythological, symbolic world may
portray commitment as an absolute that can be grasped, pos-
sessed, and incorporated, in the world of men this is never so;
the absolute remains ever an illusion. It is for this reason that

The Nature of Commitment : 235

commitment can be strengthened or lost, that some who strive are
broken and defeated, and others fall by the wayside where they
remain as passive onlookers. Alienation and estrangement for
some may be inescapable in a social framework that makes the
price of commitment very high. Personal withdrawal, disavowal
of one's claims on the system, may be the response of those within
the younger generation who cannot find (or perhaps fail to recog-
nize when they encounter) a sponsor willing and able to set
them on the road to full adulthood. Those deny the world whom
the world denies.

THE AMERICAN SCENE

When one attempts to draw conclusions from this analysis of
commitment elsewhere for the American scene, he must be quite
clear as to just what America he has in mind, for the specifics of
the American commitment cannot be transferred from its agrarian
past to the present. In an America of Main Street towns and rural
hinterland the young men came to adulthood through the claims
they asserted and the corresponding sponsorship by their fathers
and other men within the community. The claiming was validated
by the inclusion of youth within the activities and associations
of the adult male world, but the proof of the right to such inclu-
sion rested upon and within the individual himself* No simple
test, deed of valor, or affirmation constituted adequate demonstra-
tion. Instead, the whole range of cultural diversity of town and
country provided the proving ground. Equal levels of attainment
might not be demanded in all of them, but in one or more the
youth claiming manhood must establish his primary competence
in the never ceasing straggle in the economic world of farm or
business or in educational, political, religious, or professional
lines of endeavor. The measure of a man was established within,
and conf erred by, the community of which he was a member. It
is not surprising that for some the means through which they
worked should become confused with, and a substitute for, the
ends sought. Money, status, power became ends in themselves,

236 : Education and Commitment

and the desperate were willing to sacrifice much for their attain-
ment. (Any commitment that fails to extend itself to the larger
system, even if only symbolically, is stunted and ultimately cor-
rupting.) Nor is it surprising that the rigors of the course led
some to abandon the effort early and others to fall short or to
suffer defeat. But the unceasing energy displayed by so many
reflected the deeply imbedded necessity to push on.

(If thus far we have emphasized the processes of commitment
in the male world, it is because the connection between activity
and community was more obvious and direct among men than
among women. In contrast with the Navaho's deep differentiation
between male and female, in agrarian America the requirements
of girls seeking womanhood were no less rigorous than those of
boys, although simpler. From childhood they were taught the
arts of the household in preparation for their role of domesticity.
But the basis for its full realization demanded husband, home,
and children and in their strivings they were often forced to act
as aggressively as the male. They, too, had to prove themselves,
but in most instances being denied direct access to the battle-
ground of male striving, they were forced to contest in the nar-
rower sphere of the wife-husband relationship. Although the route
to their ends appeared more direct and immediate, their goals
were as deeply imbedded within the larger community as those
of the males.)

The change that came to America with the rise of metropoli-
tanism altered all of the elements necessary for commitment and
hence modified the processes of its realization. Metropolis pre-
sents no total community for which the fathers can claim their
sons in the same sense that youth had been previously inducted
to the institutional arrangements and cultural practices of the
town-community. In fact the connection between the family and
the locale has been seriously weakened, since the community is
no longer either the geographical or social ground upon which
the proof of manhood is established, Maleness and femaleness in
the bio-cultural sense have been relegated to the nuclear family
and romanticized in its narrow sexual sense by radio, television.

The Nature of Commitment : 237

movies, popular fiction, and advertising. In the process, domes-
ticity, per se, is no longer idealized as a goal of womanhood. The
family has not lost its significance, but it has become discon-
nected from other institutions and from any general symbolism
in which all of life may be interpreted,

Other institutional forms of great significance are only indi-
rectly related to either family or community. These are the corpo-
rate structures of business and government and the professionally
centered and directed activities of health, education and religion.
It is within these institutions that youth, now either male or
female, and increasingly without regard to or consideration of
sex, act out their adult roles. The commitments which are asked
of them here have no essential relation either to locale or to
family, and conflict between the two is frequent.

Given such structural noncongniency, such discontinuity within
the life process, such confusion arising from the irrelevance of
symbols to the experienced relations with others and things, it
is no wonder that those who advocate a turning in toward the
self in the search for purpose should have been so well received.
A list of such persons constitutes an illustrious roster and stretches
from Freud through Fromm, Tennessee Williams, and Norman
Mailer to the members of the Commission on National Goals,
which proclaimed the search for individual self -fulfillment as the
supreme goal of American society.

Granted that the development and growth of the individual
is a worthy ideal of any society, it is our contention that its
realization depends upon the nature of the conditions, social and
cultural, within which one must live and work. This being so,
self-realization is to be seen not as a goal but as an unearned
dividend arising from certain kinds of structural connections
in the public world. Our real concern, consequently, is that the
structural discontinuity between family and locale on the one
hand and the great superstructures on the other is creating an
environment in which commitment, in its public, objective sense,
is becoming obscure. We are fearful that technological superiority,

238 : Education and Commitment

material prosperity, the institutions which ensure their achieve-
ment, and the cult of the individual have become ersatz goals in
American civilization. Originally these were to be the instruments
through which the dream was to be made real, not the end-all of
the struggle.

11

THE
SYMBOLS OF COMMITMENT

AND
INSTITUTIONAL LIFE

John Childs once asserted that education is inescapably a moral
enterprise. 1 By that he meant that any deliberate system of
schooling involves choices among alternatives, choices that are
not merely matters of a technical procedure to achieve a desired
end but are much more significantly choices among ends them-
selves. The design of a school program (in however loose a
sense the word "design" is used) represents some conception of
the goals that ought to be pursued by individuals and by society
as a whole. Without going into detail at this point, we must
recognize one simple truth in Childs* assertion. There is some
difference between the activities of teachers and those of, say,
garage mechanics. The latter can find ample justification for their
occupation right within the technical competence of the job. The
educator must seek for the justification of his skills in something

240 : Education and Commitment

other than the exercise of them. This is not only a simple truth;
it will "be seen as a key to understanding the moralistic attitude of
educators to their work, and ultimately, to themselves.

A corollary of Childs' proposition is that all deliberate educa-
tion is concerned with developing moral commitments in the
coming generation. As a society holds that certain ends are worthy
of pursuit, it holds also that the young must be taught to pursue
them, or better, become committed to their pursuit. Education for
commitment is more an affair of developing dispositions than of
training in particular skills, for it is impossible to teach in schools
the precise Behavior that persons are supposed to exhibit for the
rest of their lives. The assumption is, however, that if certain
dispositions to behavior are promoted in the young, these same
dispositions will persist in the face of new circumstances and that
the person so educated will demonstrate his commitment as he
responds to the continually changing situations he faces over a
lifetime.

Perhaps because educational thought has been dominated by
psychology, contemporary educators have interpreted this dis-
positional sense of commitment as a matter of establishing certain
feeling states in the young. As we have argued earlier, the
equation of commitment with personal feelings is fallacious. It
remains for us to show what else besides personal feelings is
involved in commitment and to suggest what kind of education
would be required to teach it.

Let us begin with a rather abstract picture of the condition
we would refer to as one of commitment. (Later we shall add
the concrete details of contemporary life to illuminate this ab-
stract picture.) There are essentially four elements that must
be accounted for. First is the person, the concrete man or woman,
possessing particularities that distinguish him or her from the rest
of the universe, particularities which include spatio-temporal
existence as well as private psychic phenomena. Second is the
world of things and people, again considered as concrete and
existential Third are the relations among the various aspects of
the external world, particularly the relations between the person

The Symbols of Commitment and Institutional Life ; 241

and the rest of the world around him. (The ancient metaphysical
dispute over the reality of relations need not detain us; we are
speaking only of the common sense way of looking at the world,
such that we can say (i) A is a woman, (2) A lives in a world
that includes B, a man, and (3) A and B are related as wife and
husband.) Finally the set of symbols through which the person
identifies and understands himself and the rest of the world
around him, for however two persons might be related to each
other, we could not say that they are wife and husband unless
this relation occurred within a symbolic system where the ex-
pression "wife and husband" has a determinate cultural reference.

Now a situation that we would call one of commitment requires
a particular ordering, or configuration, of these elements. But
what sort of ordering? We might be inclined to say that the
simplest model of moral commitment would be one in which these
four elements are indistinguishable from each other. Thus we
could conceive of a society in which individuals do not consider
their own existence apart from the relations they bear to others,
in which the world as it actually is and the world as described in
the symbolic system of the culture is exactly the same world,
in which the symbolic system and the existential relations of
individuals to each other are in such perfect correspondence that
the person does not see than as separate entities. In such a society
there would be no problem of commitment; the woman who
should say, "I am the wife of A," would in that one statement at
once describe herself as a person, posit a world of other people,
assert the relation she bears to that world, and accept the sym-
bolic system that makes the world intelligible. We can at least
imagine a condition in which our analysis of the elements in-
volved would be incomprehensible to the person involved, for
she would see only one unified whole (which doesn't mean that
the student of society might not find the analysis meaningful).

We call up the image of that simple condition of moral commit-
ment neither to praise nor to blame it, neither as a goal to strive
for nor as an evil to avoid. Our purpose is to reveal what makes
commitment a complicated problem for contemporary educators.

242 : Education and Commitment

For In understanding these four elements as distinct from each
other, commitment becomes a matter of ordering these elements
and not of eliminating their separateness. Furthermore, we must
try to see the particular ordering of these elements of commit-
ment that characterizes the style of life of certain typical repre-
sentatives of metropolitan culture. We must look at this ordering
not just as a curiosity of cultural Me but as response to a set of
social conditions that may be the emerging pattern for American
society as a whole.

The psychically isolated person, pursuing his search for self-
hood, is an inescapable feature of our moral climate, as indeed
he probably has always been among the highly educated groups
in advanced civilizations. With our decision to have everyone
highly educated, we have made this isolation the birthright of all.
We have irrevocably lost our innocence with respect to symbolic
systems; having become conscious of the power of propaganda
and ideology, we can never again dwell comfortably with the
illusion that the world and our symbolic construction of it are
really the same thing. If we are disillusioned concerning symbols,
we are also apparently deliberately oblivious to the world itself.
We are so seldom confronted with sheer obduracy in natural
objects that we decline to recognize the monumental recalci-
trance of our social world, its seemingly uncontrolled and un-
controllable movement. And concerning the relations that people
bear to each other, we need only recall that these relations ( as
we have seen) must be kept at the lowest degree of psychical
intensity in order that we may move, physically or socially, when-
ever movement is demanded. (Given the ephemeral, transitory
character of the symbols and relations in the contemporary world,
it is not surprising that educators have turned by and large to
personal feelings as the foundations for moral commitment. At
least personal feelings seem more real, more solid as it were,
than the other elements involved.)

There is no reason to suppose that the social tendencies which
have brought about this condition of isolation among the various
elements of commitment will suddenly reverse themselves. We

The Symbols of Commitment and Institutional Life ; 243

would rather be well advised to consider that education for moral
commitment will be effective only to the extent that it recognizes
and attempts to deal with the actual, existential situation instead
of seeking some panacea in the mythical past A modem person,
deprived forever of primitive innocence, is committed to some-
thing when he has achieved a cognitive comprehension of his
personal and social situation, is conscious of the elements in-
volved, and has accepted some aspects of the situation as part
of self and rejected others as foreign to self. Thus, education for
commitment involves both learning the process of acceptance
and rejection and learning to judge among the objectives for
those that are worthy of acceptance, meaning that it is primarily
an intellectual affair though with emotional overtones that can-
not be ignored.

COMMimvtENT IN THE CONCRETE AFFAIRS OF
LIFE MOBILITY

Still, only instances of actual behavior can give meaning to our
analysis. Let us see what conditions call out the behavior that
best illustrates what we mean by cxmrautmeiiL It is perfectly
just to say that all behavior is a reflection of commitment; that
the day-to-day performance of tasks, the simple adjustments of
people to the world around them all give some due to the com-
mitments that supposedly underlie them. But it is very difficult
to judge exactly what commitments are thus exhibited. The fact
that the American people, by and large, pay their debts without
coercion is certainly a fact of great significance^ but the social
analyst who would attempt to read directly from that fact to what
it signifies is foolhardy, to say the least So also with the fact
tkat the American people will tolerate outrageously libidinal
symbols m tiheir mass media* Does this mean that we are com-
mitted to the excitation of the libido per se ? or committed to the
freedom of advertisement, or that we are simply tmconcerned
one way or another? It is well-nigh impossible to determine the
moral significance of these facts in themselves.

244 : Education and Commitment

Let us turn, then, from ordinary behavior and consider the
periodic rituals of life. In many primitive societies it is easy to
see the basis of commitment in the rituals that accompany the
major acts in the great drama of life: in the individual acts of
birth, puberty, marriage, and death and in the social acts that
mark the cycles of the group's activities, the planting and harvest.
But in contemporary urban culture these rituals are very difficult
to interpret. The symbols of the rituals tend to be those which
in ordinary circumstances we would regard as purely ideological.
The rites of the church may be comforting to the bereaved, even
though the symbolic content of these rites never penetrates con-
sciousness. Or consider the holidays of the winter solstice in
America: we celebrate the season, sometimes with rewarding
gusto, but the symbols of our celebration might seriously con-
fuse the scholar who should try to examine their content as a
means of determining the basis of our moral commitment. He
might well say that this seasonal celebration illustrates the pro-
foundly Christian basis of our culture, and he might as easily
say that the celebrations prove that Mammon is our god and
Henry Ford his prophet. Neither interpretation would contribute
very much to our understanding of the nature of commitment
in contemporary culture. 2

If we find it impossible to derive significance either from the
uncomplicated daily life or from the periodic rituals of our soci-
ety, we may have more success if we examine a slightly different
facet of contemporary life: namely, the kind of behavior that is
exhibited when interpersonal conflicts threaten to appear and
disrupt the normal day-to-day adjustments of people. There are
two reasons for believing that this aspect of life may yield more
insight than the others we have mentioned. The first reason points
to a cultural universal: interpersonal conflict arises in all societies
and must be resolved within certain prescribed limits if the soci-
ety is to maintain itself. And since the resolution of conflict re-
quires the acquiescence of persons to the demands of the group,
it must reveal something of that group's definition of commitment
The second reason points to the depth of American preoccupation

The Symbols of Commitment and Institutional life : 245

with smooth personal relations. We expend great efforts to mini-
mize conflict among persons and groups, and we have created
many instruments specifically for this purpose. These include
interracial and religious councils, formalized training in human-
relation skills In industry and government, and professional coun-
seling. We deplore and avoid open eruptions. We show anxious
concern over any hazards that might prevent our working easily
with others, and we go to great lengths to assure painless inter-
personal contacts.

It is unnecessary to inquire into the sources of interpersonal
tensions. To draw an analogy from mechanics, we might say that
friction is an inevitable consequence of people rubbing together
in human association, and the way in which a society provides a
lubricant to limit the effects of friction is the interesting part of
the story. For each person in the society will have contacts with
others, some of whom are like him in age, sex, and social status
and some of whom are different in these respects, and thus the
same lubricant will not work equally well for all points of con-
tact. It is in the different ways that we resolve our interpersonal
tensions that we may get some insight into the nature of com-
mitment in the contemporary scene.

The only sure way to avoid friction, of course, is to prevent
contact altogether. The obvious anonymity of impersonality of
contemporary urban life is, by definition, tihe maintenance of the
social distance that prevents interpersonal conflict. People whose
bodies are separated only by the thickness of two sets of gar-
ments are still effectively isolated from each other in the sub-
ways or in the passing crowd upon the street This anonymity
is a social mechanism, one that must be learned and one that
must be paid for at some point in the total system.

The opposite extreme from the subway is the nuclear family;
here, albeit intermittent, interpersonal contact is total among
persons who are different in age and sex. Between the contacts
of persons on the subway and in the family are arranged all the
other institutional forms of association of the urban society*
Within this middle range of association the cburch, the busi-

246 : Education and Commitment

ness, the neighborhood, the civic groups interpersonal conflict
is usually resolved by withdrawal from contact. A moment's
thought will show that this is a key consideration in trying to
understand the nature of commitment in contemporary society.
But one must be cautious in his interpretation of what this
phenomenon signifies.

THE OLD ARMY

It would be easy to say that a person who is psychically pre-
pared to leave a system because of interpersonal conflict has no
real commitment to it But we can see why this easy generaliza-
tion is false by contrasting the nature of moral commitment, in
the teaching profession with that of the United States Army and
Navy prior to World War II. In the Army and Navy there was
an almost deliberate attempt to intensify interpersonal conflict
and to force the parsons so involved to remain in, and live with,
die situation. The context was one of effective separation of "the
service" from civilian community life by spatially isolated military
units on reservations, posts, and stations. Ritual and regulations
enforced strict codes of behavior upon and between officers and
enlisted personnel in official roles. But within this context, club
life, especially among the officers but also for enlisted men, en-
forced an intimacy of association that could be made bearable
only when interpersonal relations were the most cordial. At the
same time the enormous importance given to minute gradations
in rank constituted a constant source of interpersonal friction.
And as these gradations were felt as strongly by the wives and
family as by the men themselves, there was no escape from them
in the home. Yet there was always one escape: a man could re-
quest a transfer. But to do so was to run risk of disgrace; it was
to demonstrate a lack of personal courage and an absence of firm
commitment to the service. The system, in short, forced the per-
sons in it to find some means by which they could transcend
interpersonal conffict and learn to live with unpleasant tensions
without being personally destroyed by them. At the same time

Symbols of Commitment and Institutional Life : 247

the calculated practice of assigned individual rotation and mass

transfer of units required a constant posture for movement and
physical readjustment in the new situation. The functional value
of such training for the purposes of the military services is imme-
diately evident. 3

THE TEACHING PROFESSION

Now the structural relations within the teaching profession are
quite different Teachers and administrators are an extremely
mobile group. Anyone in the least bit accpainted with the school
as a social system will intuitively recognize that an immediately
valid reason for leaving one situation for another is that the first
contained a considerable degree of interpersonal conflict. The
idea that one has a commitment to live with a situation of un-
pleasant personal relations is indeed found among teachers and
administrators* but when a member of the teaching profession
behaves in this way, it is ordinarily a matter of personal courage
and integrity. 4 Rather than providing external support for "stick-
ing it out," the school will ease withdrawal for all parties in actual
or potential conflict The Mgh rate of mobility among teachers
and administrators reflects the fact that this occupation has
deEned roles in such fashion that persons can move freely within
a veiy wide range of situations without 1ms of personal integrity. 5

Yet there is a similarity between the military services and the
teaching prof ession that is instructive. In both cases loyalty and
commitment are defined by reference to the system as a whole,
not to the particular persons with whom one is associated. More
accurately we may say that the commitment is to the job or task
erf the system rather than to the actual relations among persons
who are associated at any particular time or place. We need
more systematic evidence on tins point, but empirical observation
establishes that personal justification of movement, either hori-
zontal or vertical, from a situation of tension is usually given in
terms erf inability to perform the task that is associated with that
situation. This is especially evident when interpersonal conflict

248 : Education and Commitment

has become overt. In tills case, we are likely to hear that the
supervising principal was not a bad person really, but he would
not give the support needed to get the job done.

This attitude makes sense only if there is a set of symbols that
give point and plausibility to the task the system is supposed to
perform. For the teaching profession this set of symbols has the
additional burden that it must be sufficiently general to apply to
any situation whatever, without being concretely exemplified in
any one situation. For example, the teacher must be committed
to developing the maximum potentiality of every individual
learner, but this commitment cannot impede the movement of
the teacher if movement is demanded of him. This accounts at
least in part for the highly moralistic tone of the symbols by
which educators communicate with each other, and more sig-
nificantly perhaps, for the fact that these symbols are extremely
abstract. The teaching profession holds its moral commitment to
the preservation and extension of democracy, to the promotion
of personal growth of students, and to maximizing the contribu-
tion of each young person to the welfare of the society. But in
concrete situations these symbols are not intended to provide
a basis on which the teacher or administrator can intellectualize
and adjust to a condition of interpersonal conflict; on the con-
trary, they serve as a rationale for movement. The potentiality and
rationale for movement in the final analysis serve as the lubricant
for friction within the teaching profession. One does not have to
accept the actual system of relations that surround him in any
ultimate sense. Any person within this system can move. Since
all know this, interpersonal conflict is kept at a minimum. One
does not have to conflict with others when association is viewed
as transitory. Or to return to the mechanical analogy, friction is
reduced when the pressure between objects is lessened.

The point of this contrast between the military and teaching
professions should be dear by now. Commitment can serve either
to force the person to remain within a situation of interpersonal
conflict or to provide the rationale for leaving such a situation,
thus reducing the conflict within it. Other occupational pursuits

The Symbols of Commitment and Institutional life : 249

would fall somewhere on the continuum between these two. But
the trend in the long run will inevitably be toward the pattern
of the teaching profession. The reasons for this are partly eco-
nomic and technological. An increasingly mobile and profession-
alized labor force is an evident requirement for the coming
modes of production. Prof essionalization will be defined by refer-
ence to generalized skills and attitudes and not, as in the older
military establishments, by reference to overriding devotion to
inherited social arrangements. In fact, for reasons of productive
efficiency as well as ideological preference, we have defined our
so-called free economy as one in which a given job of production
may be done by any one of a number of different enterprises.
Competition among and within the large corporations has become
a matter of competing for professional competence as much as
for raw materials and markets. Under these conditions the com-
mitment of professional workers must be generalized. The com-
pany that bases its personnel policies on loyalties to a particular
set of relations among people is anachronistic and probably short-
lived in the contemporary world*

CIVIC PAKTIdPATION

Exactly the same considerations hold true for commitment
in civic, religious, and neighborhood patterns of human associa-
tion. At the cost of ignoring many interesting variations among
the different institutions, we shall consider the matter of educa-
tion for civic commitment as illustrative of the entire complex.
The Citizenship Education Project, with headquarters at Teach-
ers College and financial backing from the Carnegie Corporation,
devoted years of study and promotion to the idea of increasing
the civic competence of tie youth of the nation. 6 The specific
practices encouraged by the project need not concern us here,
but its basic assumptions are quite iluminating. It defined a sym-
bolic system of the greatest possible generality, whose terms are
those of the fundamental symbolic system of our political life,
including democracy, freedom, equality, fair play, and institu-

50 : EdncsitioEi and

tional justice. The system of personal relations designated by these
symbols was also of the most general character, being essentially
one which requires that decisions be made in response both to
popular demand and to the traditional ethical bases of the society.
As with the teaching profession, the symbolic system for commit-
ment has become universalized.

But commitment in civic affairs is not just the use of these
universal symbols; it is also a matter of entering into particular
relations with other people in response to common problems. The
Citizenship Education Project recognized this. In fact its major
emphasis has been upon teaching the skills of civic participation.
But again, as is the case with the teaching profession, these are
generalized skills that may be applied in whatever local polity
one finds himself. Thus the Qtizenship Education Project defines
the person who is morally committed in civic affairs as one who
interprets his civic world in the universalized symbols of Amer-
ican democrary and participates actively and intelligently in
whatever local political situations he finds himself. Thus commit-
ment; in dmc affairs becomes no barrier to movement. Conse-
quently one is not required to live down or overcome personal
conflicts, should they arise. The sense of a permanent condition
of mobility reduces the pressure among persons. The Citizenship
Education Project, then, can and does attack the problem of inter-
personal conflict in civic participation by attention to skills of
human relations, skills which are effective only among people
whose lives touch tangentially. 7

Now something very strange happens to political symbols when
they are used in this universalized way. They have no unique
referential quality; that is to say, they do not designate any par-
ticular, historically derived pattern of relations among people.
Nor do they designate any concrete goal or aim of American
society. For concrete goals we use such words as security, in
various senses: healthy economy, personal adjustment, and tie
like. Democracy, freedom, and justice become the symbols of
common consent; since they do not discriminate in any way, they
serve to harmonize the association of people who have little in

Hie Symbols of Commitment and Institutional Life s 251

common other than these symbols themselves. They facilitate the
surface cooperation of persons who lack a deeply sensed historical
and structural unity in life experience.

This analysis, if correct, would in one sense support and in
another sense deny the claim that people must agree on ultimates
in order to cooperate effectively on proximate objectives. The
overwhelming vitality of American society makes it abundantly
evident that we can achieve efficient organization for the ac-
complishment of particular purposes. But those who would argue
that this shows we are "one nation, under God" are probably
missing the key to understanding the situation. We are, rather, one
nation under a system of symbols so abstract that they effectively
prevent differences in ultimate values from obtruding into the
details of cooperation on particular objectives. The common ac-
ceptance of contentless symbols makes it unnecessary to concern
ourselves with ultimates. Depending upon one's ideological or
religious preferences, one can assert either that we are therefore
agreed on ultimates or that ultimates simply do not matter one
way or another. The structural relations in civic life are oblivious
to this distinction.

Consider the interaction that occurs at a typical suburban cock-
tail party when semi-strangers are concerned to find out the
important facts about each other. With whatever degree of inti-
macy the situation has stimulated, they wiH ask each other about
occupation, number of children* methods of rearing them, polit-
ical party affiliations and preferences* religious background and
devotion, even attitudes toward literature, art, race^ and sex.
Knowing these things about another person enables one to classify
him or her and to predict bow the other will respond in varying
situations. But notice: no one asks whether the ether believes
in democracy, nor what conception of freedom he holds, nor how
he conceives of justice in the current scene. These questions
would be embarrassing, not because they touch on what is re-
garded as inviolably private, but because the respondent would
not know how to give iaf carnation that the questioner would find
in the least interesting. But in a group that is planning to present

252 ; Education and Commitment

a petition to the local board of education, these same symbols
appear frequently in such remarks as "All we ask is that justice
be done," or That action was high-handed and undemocratic."
In fact it is an absence of any need to be specific about the
meaning or content of these symbols that gives them their power.
The spirit of these remarks must be made clear. We have tried
to show that the basic approach of the Citizenship Education
Project corresponds rather exactly to the condition of commit-
ment in civic affairs. This commitment has two aspects: first, a
symbolic system for interpreting civic affairs that is universalized,
and hence appropriate for a population that must maintain a
condition of ready mobility; second, skills in participation, th^t
is, actual modes of cooperation for common objectives, that are
equally universal in the sense that they may be applied in any
locality or social stratum. Both of these aspects of commitment
are functionally relevant to the avoidance or resolution of any
interpersonal conflict that might interfere with effective coopera-
tion in solving civic problems. There is no reason to doubt that,
consciously or unconsciously, the Citizenship Education Project
has captured the spirit of the urban, industrial polity.

AGE AND SEX THE FAMILY

So far we have discussed commitment only in connection with
the kinds of relations that exist among ostensible peers, for in an
adult's professional and political life, as well as in his religious
participation and vocational pursuits, differences in sex and age
are held to be of no social consequence. Yet people do differ in
these respects, and somewhere in the total system these differ-
ences must be allowed to assume due importance, and when they
do, the potentiality for interpersonal conflict is increased. Al-
though the school is a situation in which differences in age are
recognized as significant, sexual differences are treated sub ro$a;
that is to say, the symbolic formulations of commitment among
teachers do not give explicit attention to the fact that teachers
and students are of two sexes. Only in the nuclear family in

The Symbols of Commitment assd Institutional Life : 253

contemporary America are persons ordered In relation to each
other with overt acceptance of differences based on age and
sex. 8 Thus we may discover rather more fundamental aspects of
commitment in our culture as we turn to the nuclear family.

The first thing that strikes one as he compares the kind of
human association found, say, in political life with that of the
family is that the symbols of commitment, so abstract in other
institutions, become here so immediately and personally com-
pelling. The symbols themselves have changed remarkably within
a few generations. Commitments are no longer mediated in terms
of "fidelity," "chastity,* "obedience/* and the like. A casual read-
ing of the editorial and advice columns in family magazines
shows a preponderence of terms like "understanding," "mutual-
ity," "sensitivity," "intuitiveness/* and "love." One might be led
at first glance to think that these refer to personal feeling states.
They do not. And this is the second major qualitative distinction
within familial commitments, that these symbols refer to the struc-
tural relations of persons of different ages and sexes, persons who
relate to each other specifically in terms of these differences and
who must resolve their interpersonal frictions within a system of
commitments. Third and finally, these symbols do not relate the
structure within the family to the world outside. Nowhere is the
schism between the private world of the nuclear family and the
public world of the great corporate superstructure revealed more
clearly.

It is quite easy to see that the symbols of commitment in the
family are more concrete, more immediately sensed, than those of
professional, or political, or religious commitment Some have
interpreted this as a sign that the family is caught up in the
materialism of contemporary culture. When Life magazine gives
a spread on "What Every American Family Wants," it portrays
an amazing variety of physical goods washing machines, auto-
mobiles, grooming aids, bathrooms. But a closer examination of
Life magazine also shows something else, that the sellers of these
articles do not believe that their buyers desire these things simply
for their possession. The tenor of advertising is quite clear: sellers

254 : Education and Commitment

assume that families will purchase these goods only when they
are seen as contributing to the achievement of a particular form
of interpersonal relations. This form has been characterized, and
caricatured, as "togetherness," a slogan which emphasizes the
minimization of interpersonal conflict. The term is not lacking in
aptness when the relations within the family are considered; but
if attention is given to the relation of the family to the largo:
community, a better term would be "apartheid."

Our point is that the symbols by which the person interprets
the world of his nuclear family designate not just material goods
but rather the kind of interpersonal relations these goods are sup-
posed to help achieve. Commitment in the family becomes ac-
ceptance of a certain potentiality that can be actualized if one
will give devotion to it Thus, this substantive, actualizable qual-
ity of the symbols of commitment in family Me make of it some-
thing quite different from commitment in other areas of life.

In our second generalization made above we asserted that the
objectives designated by the contemporary symbols of commit-
ment in family lif e were not intra-personal feeling states but struc-
tural relations. This is quite easily substantiated by purely lin-
guistic analysis; the word love and the other words that have
essentially the same meaning are relational terms, they imply an
object as well as a subject. But more significant, perhaps, than
linguistic analysis is an examination of the actual kinds of rela-
tions that these symbols mediate. Consider, for example, the
relation of dependency between children and parents. There is,
in sober fact, a mutuality in the dependency within contemporary
suburbia that distinguishes it strongly from the relation of chil-
dren to parents in agrarian America. The extension of the family
into the rest of the community is largely accomplished by the
presence of children. The phatic communication of neighborhood-
type associations, wherever encountered, can be shared fully only
by those who are in some kind of contact with children. More sig-
nificant still, the symbols of commitment by which interpersonal
conflict within the family is resolved are given their meaning in
terms that invariably include relations to children. Thus, while

The Symbols of Commitment and Institutional Life

the culture provides little or no ecoBomic function for children^
their symbolic function lias increased enormously. It is only
stretching the point a little to make the contrast between the
contemporary scene and the agrarian culture in this fashion: in
agrarian culture the work of children was often indispensable
to the achievement of the kind of life the culture defined as
worth striving for; in contemporary suburban culture the good
life itself is defined by structural relations that are almost incon-
ceivable without the presence of children. Hence the term
mutuality as part of the symbolic system of contemporary com-
mitment in family life is descriptive of structural relations, not
personal feeling states.

We now turn to our third generalization, in which we asserted
that these symbols lack connection with the world outside the
family. Again it is quite easy to point out the difference, say, be-
tween "mutuality" and "obedience,** each considered as symboliz-
ing something about the structural relation of dependency
between children and parents. For "obedience" is a general sort
of symbol; it appKes not only to the relations within a family but
also to the sorts of relations that people have to each other in a
variety of different institutional settings. When dependency is
considered in terms of obedience, the relations within the family
partake of the more general structures within the society as a
whole, such as those of employer-employee, teacher-student, or
leader-lei "Mutuality," on the other hand^ does not transfer;
it pertains to a very pecdSar Bud of relation that is found only
in the very limited system of interaction within the family. We
would hypothesize that this absence of connection between the
family as a system and the larger society should create grave
problems for those who are moving from the so-called family of
orientation to the family of procreation. And the sense of plight
among suburban adolescents and parents would amply justify
our hypothesis.

But there are rather more interesting ways to show the same
phenomenon. Consider, for example, the currently tempestuous
urge of parents to have their children go to college. The strain

256 : Education and Commitment

of interpersonal relations within the home, the frantic search for
a school that will admit an average student, the difficulty faced
by high schools that are trying to provide a rationally balanced
curriculum for each student in the face of parental demand that
Johnny be prepared for college these are the manifest symptoms.
But symptoms of what? Of social class aspirations? Not at all.
For social class strivings are possible only when the individual
family sees itself in quite determinate relations to a larger com-
munity, and, as we have been arguing aU along, this does not
hold for the family in the contemporary urban culture. This
curiously frenetic form of behavior makes sense only when seen
in connection with a culture that demands movement on the part
of all its members. Entrance into college makes possible the
smooth withdrawal of the children from the home; it prepares
these children not for any particular spot in the social order but
rather for indefinite mobility. The commitment of parents has an
intensity that demands a finite duration, and children must be
prepared to assume this commitment to persons other than par-
ents at a rather early point in their career. In short it is entrance
into college that connects the general pattern of commitment in
the culture, a commitment that depends upon ease of withdrawal
from any situation that threatens interpersonal conflict, with the
pattern of commitment in the family that depends upon structural
relations of the most intense kind. College entrance, we might
say, is the rite of passage for suburban adolescents. The lack of
connection between the family and the rest of the society makes
college entrance a uniquely important event, a focal point for
years of intra-family behavior. For only through this rite can
parents honorably discharge their final obligation to enroll their
children in the larger social order.

Thus moral commitment within the family is of an order dif-
ferent from other areas of life. Familial symbols possess a sub-
stantive and actualizable quality distinct from those found in
professional or- civic activity where symbols are abstract and
hence possess generalized applicabiKty. In contrast, within the
family the symbols are personally compelling because of their
immediate and deep expression of the structural relations of per-

The Synil>ols of Commitment and Institutional Life : 257

sons of different ages and sexes who must resolve their conflicts
within a system of dependency which binds both child and par-
ent. A child may leave a family without destroying it, but a par-
ent cannot.

Perhaps some additional observations will help to emphasize
our central point. The increasing professionalization of the world
of work is diminishing the necessity for the involvement of self
in the relations with others in the task to be performed. In fact
the injection of personal commitments into organizational activ-
ity may disrupt its smooth operation. In addition, the structure
of a professionalized organization resembles rather closely the
mass-produced machine. Unlike the hand-fitted parts of a rifle
produced by a skilled artisan, the separate pieces of the modem
rifle are so machined that each part is replaceable by one which
resembles it exactly, reducing the correction of malfunctioning
to a minimum of time and effort.

In the same way, the positions which individuals occupy in the
organization are standardized in their descriptions. The specific
person is only a temporary occupant whose worth is measured in
terms of his ability to fill a slot within a complex of positions.
Replacements consist of those whose characteristics fit the prop-
erties called for in that position. There is no intention to denigrate
the worth of the individual by this analogy, nor to deny that each
person adds (or subtracts) a special quality to the job he per-
forms. Our purpose is to draw attention to a basic difference in
the structure of the relations among those in an organization and
those of the family, and hence to the difference in the commit-
ments demanded.

Even tinder these conditions, and with generalized ratter than
substantive symbols to express commitment, there is still the need
for devices which minimize the inevitable friction between indi-
viduals in their pursuit of a common goal. In the military, diverse
persons could be readily related to each other through an elab-
orated ritual of etiquette, but ceremonialized behavior can pro-
vide a basis on which those in conflict can relate to each other
only where the generalized symbols are still subscribed to. When
the social condition changes, as it has in the position of Negroes

258 : Education and Commitment

and whites in the south, the etiquette of race relations proves to
be empty in the face of its violation. The ritual of family relations,
once sharply evident in our agrarian past and still persistent in
other countries of the world, has declined to a near minimum.
Thus the nuclear family, by virtue of its composition by specific
persons, cannot reduce its tensions by utilizing the principle
of replaceable parts or by recourse to ritualized behavior.

As opposed to other institutional connections among the con-
temporary American people, the nuclear family is not one in
which interpersonal conflict can be resolved by smooth and
easy withdrawal from contact. Togetherness must be seen as a
dynamic equilibrium in which powerful centrifugal forces are
matched by an equally powerful centripetal pull. When the dis-
ruptive tendencies overpower, the only symbol by which separa-
tion is morally justified is that of the supreme cult of all in
American life: self -fulfillment One can divorce Ms mate and
continue to maintain his posture as a human being of the highest
commitment only if he is willing to acknowledge the inability
of both parties to find fullest self-realization in the dissolved
union. Thus the distinction between trespasser and trespassed
against melts away. Rights, obligations, justice tike universal
symbols by which transitory relations in the corporate world are
kept smoothly ordered have no ultimate sanction for commit-
ment within the nuclear family.

And so once again, but perhaps more clearly now, we see the
inescapable function of the school to bring the child from the
world of the family and induct him into the corporate world, but
to do this without destroying his willingness and ability to i=e-
establish his awn nuclear family with all its potential for tragedy
and for self-fulfillment Only by dying can an American escape
the drive for movement and change; this leaves only two alter-
natives for one who would live as a member of this new social
system: either he can be carried along as a passive passenger, or
he can be himself a moving force in determining his own destiny,
The difference will be in the degree to which he knows what the
system is.

12

THE
ELEMENTS OF COMMITMENT

AND
SENSE OF SELF

THE SYMBOLS OF COMMITMENT BECONSIDERED

The fundamental symbols erf commitment in American tsulture
are derived from a peculiar historical development The language
of American political and moral ideals extends deeply into the
Old Testament and classical Hellas as these were finally focused
in the documents and thoughts of the liberal tradition in western
Europe. But the meaning, the personalty and socially compelling
dynamism, of the language came from the American experience.
Specifically it came from two centuries of agrarian experience in
America. The Gettysburg Address, to choose only the most obvi-
ous example, is historically symbolic erf the moral commitments
erf agrarian America. But in a non-historic sense, in a sense not
related to specific events in time and space, it is also symbolic of

260 : Education and Commitment

the commitments of a separately identifiable urban culture. This
fact of the non-historic character of our symbols as they function
in the context of the urban culture is central to understanding
certain problems in education for moral commitment. 1

The overriding problem is that when symbols of moral commit-
ment are divorced from a historical context, they become abstract
in the pejorative sense of the term, for abstract symbols lack the
power to unify personal and collective action. They serve poorly,
if at all, to express a sense of self and the world. As the nature
of the structural connections among people changes, so too must
the meaning of the symbols by which these structures are under-
stood and incorporated alter; else we have the vacuous quality of
symbolic interaction so noticeable in the microcosm of suburban
life.

Many observers of the contemporary scene have commented
on the apparent irresponsibility that characterizes the higher
levels of the power hierarchy in our industrial, military, and
governmental systems. 2 In part this complaint stems from the
excessively abstract nature of the symbols of commitment. Di-
vorced from the historical process of their evolution, these sym-
bols become tools of propaganda rather than expressions of
personal and social commitment* The degradation of language,
an apparently inescapable concomitant of the advertising age,
finds its most blatant expression in the efforts of political and
industrial leaders to excuse and justify antisocial conduct by
appealing to abstract political and moral ideals. "Peace, Pros-
perity, and Progress" is an appealing phrase, not solely because
of its alliteration, but more importantly because it captures words
that are symbolic of the historic goals of American society. But
as used in recent politics, these words degrade communication;
they reflect a lack of responsiveness to actual conditions and
problems*

Yet as always, when a total cultural movement is brought
under analysis, there is a credit as well as a debit side to its
ledger. By losing connection with a unique historical experience,
the symbolic system of America becomes broader and more

The Elements of Commitment and Sense of Self : 261

inclusive in intention as well as extension. The rights and obliga-
tions, the duties and privileges it expresses can now literally apply
to all men, regardless of race, creed, or national origin. America's
dramatic role as the Universal State of Western Civilization, if
we may be excused a Toynbeean grandiloquence, malces it im-
perative that her language be truly universal and thus capable
of incorporation by those whose historical experience has been
different from that of agrarian America. It is not at all paradoxical
that isolationism and McCarthyism were centered in the heart-
land of agrarian America where, more than elsewhere in the
United States, the symbols of liberty and equality were expressive
of actual commitment and behavior. For whereas these symbols
in the Midwest were still historical in import, taMng their mean-
ing from, and giving deeper significance to, the actual experiences
of a commercial agrarian society, on the eastern seaboard these
same symbols had already been idealized and universalized. 3 Al-
though Woodrow Wilson and Wendell WilBcie spoke the language
of the American agrarian experience, they spoke it in the univer-
salized tongue of an urban industrial culture, and it is with the
latter tongue that America today tries to capture the imagination
and loyalty of the world.

But can a symbolic system be both socially compelling and
abstractly universal? Does the absence of strong historical roots
necessarily render a symbolic system vacuous and emotively
neutral? There are scarcely any historical precedents by which
we might sound out an answer to these questions. America has
turned its back forever on the distinction between jus cives and
jus gentium by which the Romans tried to resolve a similar prob-
lem. Nor can we utilize the stratagems of Stalin, who turned the
universal symbols of Marxism outward to the world but appealed
to the deeper historical sentiments of Russian destiny when the
Nazis threatened to destroy him. For better or worse, America is
committed to this experiment. The answers of future generations
will reflect the effectiveness of education (and, as we shall try
to demonstrate, not just education in general but deliberate edu-
cation) in the coining years.

262 : Education and Commitment

A SENSE OF SELF AND A SENSE OF THE WORLD

Here we must tread upon dangerous ground. We must face
the question whether it is humanly possible to develop a viable
sense of self and a sense of relatedness of self to a world within
the contemporary urban-industrial culture. There is, of course, the
quick affirmative answer of the modernist. Comparative anthro-
pology leads us to believe that there are virtually no limits to the
different kinds of adaptive behavior that people can work out
and sustain within a cultural framework. Among the hundreds of
identifiable cultures are to be found the different ways of doing
almost all the things that people do, and what is according to
nature at one time and place may be unnatural at another.
Prima vista, no particular way of rearing children, making a liv-
ing or making love, eating, drinking, or painting pictures is more
natural or unnatural than another. We tend to smile at those
whom David Riesman calls "old-fashioned moralists," who fulmi-
nate against particular kinds of behavior simply because the
behavior is different from what it was at some other time. (In
fact we tend to smile at Riesman when he sounds like an old-
fashioned moralist.) 4 We are consuming more material goods at
a faster rate than we used to do; we are more mobile and more
highly educated than ever before; we have rid ourselves of a
certain amount of superstition and a large amount of disease,
poverty, and drudgery. And because of this, we are capable of
directing our attention inward and outward in a more intelligent,
more liberated fashion than our ancestors were able to do.
Develop a sense of self and a sense of the world? Why, this is the
unique privilege of each individual in America!

**The case for modern man,** characteristically strongest when
put in terms of counterattack upon those who would deny
modernism, is weakest when it deals directly with the actual
conditions of human life within the urban-industrial culture.
The reason for this weakness should be evident Modernism inter-
prets a sense of self and sense of the world as a personal, an
individual state of consciousness. But if we are to understand the

The Elements of Committment and Sense of Self : 263

problem of selfhood and relatedness, we must see it as an aspect
of the actual ways people join with each other to do the things
that people do. The argument for modernism says that there is
no intrinsic reason why a mobile, productive, and materially
comfortable style of life should prevent people from establishing
a secure sense of self and a sense of stability and intelligibility
in the world. But we have still to ask whether within the urban-
industrial culture as we know it this sense is actually achieved. We
rather doubt that any astute observer is likely to give an im-
mediate and unqualified answer when the question is posed in
this fashion. 5

A clinical or therapeutic approach to the nature of self is
obviously beyond the scope of this chapter, but one assumption
common to our approach and to the clinical approach is worth
stating. Selfhood is an achievement, not a biological datum. It
can be achieved and maintained only within a social and physical
setting, and the setting must provide somewhat stable expecta-
tions that answer to the self-concept of the individual Any radical
and prolonged disparity between the person's sense of himself
and the responses he receives from his social and physical
setting will either destroy the integrity of the self or and this
is more to our point will so isolate the person from his world
that the kind of connection we are calling commitment will be im-
possible to attain. The first eventuality loss of an integral self-
concept produces die phenomena of clinically defined mental
illness. The second alienation produces what may be called,
in an admittedly metaphorical sense, social illness. The implica-
tions from this general assumption give us a clue to the problem
of education for moral commitment in contemporary culture.

Building a sense of self is vary much a matter of integrating and
harmonizing certain general biological and social roles. No one
can conceive of himself as just a person; his conceptions must
be that of a man or a woman, someone who is young or old,
producer of something and consumer of other things. A person is
a kind of person, never just an undifferentiated blot. He is some-
one with a certain color of skin and a national tradition of one

264 : Education and Commitment

sort rather than another. He worships one god, or many, or none.
He is a father or a mother, a son or a daughter, and perhaps he
is a lover; he is never none of these things. Physical strength
or physical weakness, intellectual competence or fatuity, openness
or closedness to other people every person stands somewhere on
these and many, many other continua. From the standpoint of
psychological therapy, it is important that a person's concept
of himself correspond to reality. For our analysis that is less to
the point than is the stark fact that selfhood is a finely differ-
entiated rather than a gross unstructured affair.

A sense of the world is the reverse side of the same coin.
One can conceive of himself as a Christian only when he con-
ceives of the world as a place where being a Christian makes
some difference. And he can establish a viable conception of the
world as making some place for being a Christian, only when the
world does, as a matter of fact, provide meaningfully for such
differentiation. And this is why the currently frenetic search for
autonomy, for selfhood-from-within, a search that is led by the
many-striped existentialists and trailed by the bravado of The
Organization Man, will be necessarily futile. 6 For selfhood, which
is a personal achievement, depends upon the prior existence of a
system of social relations that support and extend the elements
on which a self is constructed. This analysis gives us a lever by
which we can pry out the most important sense of our original
question, i.e., whether the sense of self can be achieved in the
contemporary urban-industrial culture.

If we look no further than Henry Adams' interesting juxta-
position of the Virgin and the Dynamo, we are likely to give
immediate "no" to the question. For the Dynamo, the archetype
of machine technology, recognizes nothing in persons beyond
their capacity to do a particular job in a particular way. 7 Man
or woman, Jew or Christian, young or old, the person who deals
with the machine is responded to by the machine as simply an-
other machine. The human being finds himself treated solely in
relation to his mechanical function and his own self -concept
becomes a stunted, mechanical view.

The Elements of Commitment and Sense of Self : 265

This has long been the distinguishing argument of the humanis-
tic revolt against a machine culture. But only those unacquainted
with the actual conditions of human association in production and
oblivious to the dynamics inherent in contemporary technology
itself could have seriously supported it. Looked at from the out-
side, the machine world is indeed inhuman and frightening to
those who are concerned with seeing that human beings live as
humans. But viewed from the inside, as has been revealed clearly
in numerous studies, the machine world is still a human world. s
When Lindbergh used the pronoun "we" in describing his solo
flight across the North Atlantic, his listeners interpreted it as a
mark of modesty. But it was perhaps also his unconscious
affirmation that the inside of the world of flying was a world of
people, as well as a world of inanimate machines. The machines
did, indeed, impose a discipline on the group association,
but as the subsequent history of aviation amply demonstrates,
it was not a discipline that necessarily stifled selfhood. Since long
before Lindbergh and on through the very recent studies of
group association in the United States Air Force, the story of men
and flying machines shows that the interpersonal but knowable
properties of the machines establish a basis of stable expectations
on which personally effective group association can be built.

Here is, indeed, the strongest argument for modernism* There
is nothing in machine technology itself that prevents the effective
development of self and a stable sense of the world. If it were
otherwise, any further discussion of education for moral commit-
ment would be fruitless. If we were forced to choose between
the benefits of machine production on one hand and the achieve-
ment of a viable self-concept on the other, we would be in a
hopeless dilemma. But fortunately, those are not our only options.

We did not choose the assembly line production process as our
example because the flying machine more adequately represents
the dynamic direction of machine technology. Although Marx's
descriptions of mill workers in the nineteenth century does
indeed present a picture of a form of association that stifles the
development of selfhood, the gradual elimination of this form of

260 : Education and Commitment

industrial organization has been proceeding with ever greater
acceleration. And measured either by hours or by number o
persons, the demand for labor in the actual processes of techno-
logical production will continue to decrease. It has been pre-
dicted that the proportion included in the labor census figures
under the heading "Mining and Manuf acturing" will continue to
decline from its high point reached in 1920. Moreover, that pro-
portion will be composed almost entirely of highly trained tech-
nicians, 9 associated in very human ways as production teams.
We sympathize with the disfranchised humanist who sees the
world of technology as one vast nightmare stifling the human
spirit, but the only way to overcome a nightmare is to awaken
oneself into the world of reality.

The great threat to the achievement of selfhood and moral
commitment is not, then, the world of production. On the con-
trary, the well-designed production team represents in micro-
cosm precisely the kinds of relation that we would call one of
commitment. First, each person has a determinate role in the
team, a role he can perceive as an indispensable element in his
own self -concept. Second, this role, which has been shown to be
more than mere technical skill, is recognized in the group as per-
forming a function. Third, the work of the team as a whole is
disciplined and supported by objectively defined purposes* The
stories that follow the launching of each new space vehicle are
essentially descriptions of the ^well-designed'* production team.
The long days and nights of work that go into these achievements
do not, in any important sense, represent a sacrifice of self to
group purposes. On the contrary, if we may judge from the pub-
lished reports, Wernher von Braun and his associates, as well as
their many successors, found within the objective purposes of
their project a heightened sense of self and relatedness to the
world. Whether a basically military purpose is a worthy purpose
ia the contemporary world is another question, but the presence
o a moral commitment in this instance can scarcely be denied. ia

The form of human association required by recent technology
is probably the "saving remnant" in contemporary culture that
enables us to speak meaningfully of what commitment might

The Elements of Qwimlta^nt and Sense of Self : 267

mean. We have emphasized the point that a sense of self must
take account of the distinctiveness of the various elements that
comprise personality. Studies of people~on-the-job show clearly
that human beings are related to each other as people, not as
isolated automatons. One worker is the old man of sage, if
platitudinous, advice. Another is the young Lochinvar, expected
to give signs of erotic passion whenever a desirable sex object
comes into view. Still others have roles as clowns, as inhibitors
or initiators of novel behavior, as rebels or reactionaries, as sup-
porters or destroyers of the ostensible purposes of the team. The
fact that no element of selfhood is automatically excluded from
the role expectations of the production team contradicts the
older sociological notion that urban culture segments the per-
sonality and makes one a punch operator on the job, a father in
the home, a Grand Knight in Lodge meeting all essentially
different and mutually exclusive roles. It just doesn't happen
that way. No one is merely a punch operator on the job; he is
interrelated with a determinate group in many and quite subtle
ways. These complex interrelations provide stabilizing expecta-
tions around which a matching complex of self-conceptions can
be achieved, 11

Still, the production team accounts for only a few of the
many elements that a complete sense of self and relatedness must
encompass. For commitment to a single task of production is
not enough. Regardless of the amount of dedication that a parson
may give to his production job, unless that job itself is seen by
the person as worthwhile for some larger social purpose, the
member of the production team is still a social isolate. Just as
commitment in the nuclear family is incomplete and self -defeat-
ing when taken out of relation to cormnitment to community so,
too, is commitment in the production team incomplete when its
work is not integrally related to larger social values.

There are really two different sides to the question that must
be answered before this matter of sense of self and sense of the
world can be understood. The first is the purefy factual or
empirical side: Is there commitment in the lives of men and
women? If so, then commitment to what? And why commitment

% 68 : Education and Commitment

to those things rather than to other things? The second is the
normative or ethical side: Is the given commitment justifiable?

Before we turn to a discussion of commitment as a facet of
social structure, let us summarize the matter of commitment and
sense of self. It is not inaccurate to say that a sense of self is
primary to any discussion of commitment, for we can talk about
commitment only in respect of persons who are, in some sense,
aware of themselves as persons. But a sense of self is not a
mere awareness that one is a person; it requires acceptance of
being a particular person, possessing such distinguishing attri-
butes as being of one sex rather than the other, as having a
certain age and skin color, as coming from a particular national
or religious tradition, as occupying one occupational status
rather than others, as enjoying certain forms of art, and so on.
Now this sense of self simply cannot be achieved and maintained
apart from forms of human association that recognize and respond
to these differences. There is much in contemporary human inter-
course that militates against the achievement of a sense of self.
But the most damning allegation against an industrial culture
is that its basic technology requires that people be related to
each other without any regard to those characteristics by which
a sense of self is achieved and maintained. While this allegation
might be sustained if directed against the nineteenth century
factory mode of production, it is not true of the production team
that is the basic form of association in truly contemporary tech-
nology. On the contrary, the production team, probably only less
than the nuclear family, carries the burden of humanizing and
personalizing all those complex relations that are beyond compre-
hension at the level of society as a whole. But to understand this
last comment, we must now look to commitment in relation to
social structure.

MORAL COMMITMENT AND STRUCTURAL CONNECTIONS

If we consider the specialist in a production team, the member
of a neighborhood committee for the United Fund, and the

Hie Elements of Commitment and Sense of Self : 209

teacher In a public school, we can quite readily detect four
features common to all three. First, the individual must adapt
and contribute to the task-orientation of the group with which
he is associated. Second, he must know how to respond to a
wide range of personality traits in his associates and at the same
time express wide ranges of his own sense of selfhood. Third, he
must maintain such capacity for movement that, at the ap-
propriate moment, he can readily depart from that particular
association and establish similar relations with new associates
in a new situation. Finally, the goals or purposes of any par-
ticular form of face-to-face association are given their symbolic
significance by the larger social system in which this association
functions.

These features would be present whether or not the association
is a pleasant one and whether or not it is effective in doing its
job. Given the necessary competence among its members, "suc-
cess* of a particular group depends upon the nuances of its rela-
tions, that is to say, upon the details of the interaction within
the group and the relations sustained by the group to the larger
social structure of which it is a part. The highly emotional tone
that surrounds current discussion of groups springs from the fact
that these groups are in microcosm the social agencies through
which the work of the world gets done. Such expressions as the
"other-directed personality" and the "organization man" appeal
to something quite fundamental in American life today; they
appeal to the day-to-day experience of most people in metro-
politan culture who find themselves acting through group associa-
tions in performing their socially important functions. 12 Hence,
the details of group operation become matters of great social
consequence. Moralists, both the old-fashioned and ultra-modern
varieties, have given attention to the legitimacy of the demands
that a group can make on the individual. Psychologists have
investigated tie details of the influence of group association
upon personality. Propagandists have pleaded for and against
the deliberate use of refined group techniques in areas where

270 : Education and Commitment

they are at present not actively employed, for example in some
aspects of church life and in teaching college classes.

For our purposes, the important point in respect to group
association in contemporary culture is that it represents the
medium through which commitment can be expressed. The great
decisions that affect the total course of our nation are made,
for good or ill, within the interrelated structures of group asso-
ciations. (Who first said: "According to Christian theology,
even the universe is ruled by a Committee of Three"?) But still
more significant is the fact that even the ordinary citizen must
exercise his commitments through various kinds of association.
He performs his economic tasks through his production team, his
civic tasks through his special committee, his religious observ-
ance through an age or sex group, and his esthetic participation
through membership in an interest group. And whether he does
his jobs well or poorly, that is to say, whether or not he makes a
significant social contribution and reaps important psychical
rewards for so doing, depends upon the details of his association
with other people.

(Please do not interpose the trite objection that the social
contributions of Bartok, Bergson, and Bohr cannot be explained
by their group affiliations! This line of argument is an inevitable
cul-de-sac; it diverts attention from the inquiry and turns it
toward harangue. Agreed that the creative genius in music,
philosophy, and science is God's noblest product But even he
must live in a social system. In an ultimate sense his creations are
derivatives of that system; and, more in point, his achievements
become social contributions only as they enter into the lives of
other people who are associated in performing groups, study
groups, and research teams.)

We would expect that the ability to function effectively in
groups of this sort would become an important dimension of
personality development. And if we look again at the nuclear
family, in our society the basic determinant of personality
structure, we find that the life of the child within that family is
the basic model for all other forms of group association. Notice

The Elements of CaaaaataSbaaKiA and Sense of Self : 271

again the four features of group association we mentioned just
above:

i. Task-orientation. What is the task to be performed by any
particular nuclear family? Is it to amass wealth? To rise in the
social scale? To meet the varied psychical needs of its members?
To serve as a unit of consumption., if not production, in the eco-
nomic system? It is, of course, all of these things. But the
particular definition of any of these tasks is made within die
interaction of the members of the family. As the child grows with-
in the family, he must learn both to adapt to the already existing
definitions of these tasks and to contribute to their re-definition.
The amassing of wealth, for example, may be originally inter-
preted as accumulating enough money so that father may start a
new business on his own, but the daughter who demonstrates
academic aptitude must learn to contribute to the re-definition
of that task so that it includes the getting together of enough
money to enable hex to pursue her education. Vocational counsel-
ing in schools recognizes that part of the job of preparing for
an occupation is to learn how to educate one's family to accept
the cost of training for that occupation as one of its obligations.

This is a temfyingly subtle skill. Its development cannot
wait until the last year of high school But obviously it does not
wait until then. It begins in ntero, as it were, when the family's
definition of itself and its goals responds delicately to the needs
of the unborn child. Less fancifully., the child in a contemporary
family throughout his life comes to perceive himself as having
to adapt to the existing definitions of his family's tasks. But also,
in a miniature mirror image of his later functions in other groups,
he is also to contribute to the re-definitions of these tasks. A
member of a United Fund Committee was speaking; he said, TE
consider our job more than just raising a specified sum of money.
We have an educational task to do. This community is pitifully
ignorant of just what the United Fund does." This is what we
mean by contributing to task-orientation. This is a skill; it is also
a commitment built into personality by the interaction within the
extemporary nudear family.

272 ; Education and Commitment

2. Responding to wide ranges of personality in others and ex-
pressing wide ranges of one's own personality in groups. Where
the task to be done is clearly and finally determined, one need
only express those aspects of self that are immediately related
to the task at hand. But where one must also contribute to the
re-definition of those tasks, then another and rather more subtle
form of interaction is required. One consequence of this form of
interaction is that culturally defined sex roles lose their sharp
edges. In the agrarian culture these sex roles were carefully
differentiated, and those who did not repress their sensitivity
to beauty and ugliness and their responsiveness to the feelings
of other people, all defined as feminine traits, found themselves
outcasts from their own tradition. 15 The nuclear family in con-
temporary America, however, not only permits, in effect it
demands, that each member respond to every facet of the per-
sonality of the others and, in turn, express every facet of his own
personality. The image of the G.I. father who dried the dishes and
diapered the baby is probably fading from the contemporary
scene, but this image was only the visual manifestation of
something more fundamental. The child of either sex in the
nuclear family must learn both "male" logic and "feminine" in-
tuition. The virtues (from the Latin vir, i.e., "a real man") of
temperance, courage, and justice are tempered in both sexes by
Christian and feminine humility and forgiveness. A family system
can train its young to respond to only those traits of other people
that fit into a determined sex role. It can train its young to ex-
press only those features of self that are appropriate to one sex.
But the mobile nuclear family of contemporary America must
train for both response and expression in a different way. And in
dominant forms of group association outside the family the same
demand is made. The production team, for example, notes and
respects the sex of each of its members; but it also demands that
each, in the now trite but still appropriate words of George
Herbert Mead, recurrently "take the role of the other." 14

Imagine a suburban housewife describing herself and her Me
in the following way: "Who am I? I am a woman, but I must not

The Elements of Commitment and Sense of Self * 273

be so entirely woman that I cannot feel what it is like to be a
man. I am approaching middle age; this I must accept while
refecting neither my youth, thus losing my capacity to feel joy
and sorrow as children feel them, nor my approaching old age
and the capacity to share those colder and more dreadful feel-
ings. I have my own economic and personal limitations. I know
also that these are different from my friends' and neighbors',
and I must feel as they feel their own strengths and weaknesses.
My skin color and religion are parts of my being, and so are
different colors and religions to those with whom I work and
play. My vision of my own future has changed with changing
associations, and so my own hopes and fears have been subtly
influential in shaping the lives of others from the day of my
birth. Who am I? It all depends."

This would be an odd way to talk but a normal way to behave.
One can see, albeit dimly, a certain functional value in this form
of human thought and feeling for an economic order that de-
mands high levels of both production and consumption from its
members. Where there are potentialities within the person, they
must be given a chance for development. Hence the form of
human association must provide opportunity for expressing and
developing these potentialities in individuals. (This sounds
terribly recondite for such a simple phenomenon. But after all,
what symbols do we have to express in an everyday fashion the
everyday reality of our lives?)

3. Every group association is conditioned by the imminence
of disruption. Administrative procedure requires that a firm
line be drawn between the ad hoc group, formed for the ac-
complishment of a limited task, and the organization of persons
for the continuous operation of the enterprise. But as perceived
by the individual, the distinction between the two is not sharp
at all. In the neighborhood, in the church, in the company, in
the political party every group is ad hoc in the sense that one's
association with It is tempered by the deep, implicit awareness
that one must be prepared to leave whenever the proper moment
arrives.

274 : Education and Commitment

The ability to relate one's self effectively to other people in
the ways described above and yet be prepared to move at any
time is without doubt the most difficult demand placed upon
personality by the conditions of life in contemporary society.
The fact that we can do it, and often in the absence of any
clear rationale for our actions, means that we have been con-
sciously or unconsciously trained in a very effective manner. It
reflects the success of a most unusual system of personality
development as found in the structural relations of the child in
the contemporary nuclear family. In a continuously expanding
fashion, the child participates in the definitions of his family's
goals. He learns to respond to the subtlest nuances of interper-
sonal relations and to express all shades of his own personality in
family association. Yet, from the very beginning, this associa-
tion is shot through with impermanence. Parents know, with
complete conscious awareness* that the child of today will be a
mobile man or woman tomorrow, a person whose relation to the
original "family of orientation" will be qtxfte ephemeral once his
independent course of movement is begun. (When do children
learn this? There is some evidence that children become ex-
plicitly conscious of certain social class distinction around the
fifth year in school, ie., around the eleventh year of age. It may
be that a full awareness of the fact that the relation to parents
is of short-term duration is connected with the changing percep-
tions of other youngsters. But more evidence is needed before
firm conclusions can be drawn. 15 )

This condition of impermanence touches the deepest aspects of
personality. It extends to the most fundamental human responses,
those that are developed in the initial relations of the child to
his parents. GmLt and anxiety are inevitable concomitants of the
basic structure of the nuclear family itself. Yet, the system oper-
ates. And because it operates successfully, we may surmise that
the family system provides for title release of guilt and the abate-
ment of anxiety. Contemporary provisions for psychical freedom
stand out most clearly if seen in contrast with an earlier system.
The mobile young man in the family of the agrarian society

The Elements of Commitment and Sense of Self : 275

could resolve his conflict with his father through the exercise
of righteous anger. Father was a tyrant; Father did not respect
his own children, worked them like mules in the field to ag-
grandize Ms own economic position. Father did not "understand
Mother's torn body, did not even know of the hidden tears she
wept in the night* Goodbye, Father. We are well quit. Later
when I am a man we may meet again as mutually respectful
friends, but guilt and anxiety are at least temporarily alleviated.
They will return, of course, to plague my relations to my own
sons, to create the kind of conflict between me and my offspring
that will enable them to say goodbye and well quit!

Traces of this pattern still remain, of course. The conflict be-
tween generations in the immigrant families was not greatly
dissimilar. But in the nuclear family of the contemporary culture;,
this older pattern to train for mobility is gone. In that pattern,
the child did not learn to participate in the definitions of his
family's goals. Father interpreted the proper goals, and the child's
only recourse was later rebellion. Aspects of self that did not fit
directly into the family association were reserved, not expressed.

Within the nuclear family of the present day, however, a vastly
different mechanism for overcoming guilt and anxiety exists. As
young men and women leave home, they take with them all the
burden of unpaid obligations for what their parents have done.
Dad's diversion from economic success, Mom's emotional attach-
ments to now departing children these become debts that must
be paid, not to Mom and Dad but to one's own children. When
grandfather left his farm, his father's eyes were cold and his fist
was clenched, his mother's tears bespoke resignation more than
suffering. When grandson leaves for college, Dad gives a warm
handshake and Mom's tears only add sparkle to a face full of love
and hope. The pinched pocketbook and the silence of the deserted
house enable Mom and Dad to feel that the sacrifice has been
made, that the debt has been transferred with accumulated inter-
est

Thus, in contemporary industrial culture, one learns to leave the
group. And perhaps it is because the important separations of

276 : Education and Commitment

people from each other come largely before death that death
itself is largely ignored in America today. One's duties are to the
living, to the persons directly in front of one at the moment. For
those who are left behind, nothing can be added or taken away.
To these persons immediately about, one can give consideration,
tact, one's technical competence, and ultimately one's self. Guilt
and anxiety are paid out day-by-day in direct association. It is the
moral and psychological equivalent of the installment plan.

4. But no aspect of group association can be fully understood
except as we see that the meaning of any group association is
conditioned by its relation to the total social system. Any group
association? Surely the string quartet that meets monthly has no
purpose other than the enjoyment that comes from playing music.
Or take the bowling team. The occasional morning coffee in the
suburb. The street corner bull session of a summer night in the
city. Can we say in any meaningful way that these group asso-
ciations are conditioned by any relation to the vast, almost in-
comprehensible social system of metropolitan America?

Yes, we can say this, and it takes only a slight broadening of
the focus of one's attention to see that the statement is true.
The string quartet plays in the living room of a private house,
not in the salon of a merchant prince. This change may or may not
affect the quality of the music, but it clearly affects the quality
of the interaction among the musicians. The bowling team meets
on the premises of a very profitable business establishment, not
on the village green. And suburb versus city makes sense only
in the context of a particular kind of society. We are now ac-
customed to believe that one's life may be influenced by factors
one is unaware of. Psychoanalysis and studies of radiation
poisoning have taught us that. The difficulty at this point is in
recognizing the reality behind such a term as "total social system"
and to give a clear account of how the details of ordinary affairs
are conditioned by that reality.

Let us look first at the extreme conditions. During World War
II, production teams performed in quite distinctive ways de-
pending on whether or not their production was related directly

The Elements of Commitment and Sense of Self : 277

to the success of our arms in the global conflict Studies of inter-
action among groups of soldiers in wartime show a clear differ-
entiation between combat and noncombat troops. In both these
instances, however, the participants were clearly aware that they
were in (or not in) direct relation to larger social purposes.

But more often the relations are unusually subtle and hard to
determine, and frequently precisely the wrong conclusions are
drawn from the experience of extreme conditions. Principals of
high schools advise their students to study hard because we are
in a technological race with the Russians. More or less uncon-
sciously, the student says to himself:

If winning a technological race with the Russians is the
only goal of our society, then I and my companions have no
genuine role to play. The superintendent's words are pure
cant, and probably everything else responsible adults say
is also cant. If our lives here and now are to be meaningful
to us, we must develop our own sets of symbols and values
apart from the larger system represented by the superin-
tendent's obvious nonsense. 16

The student is correct, of course. The answer is not to be found
in faking relations that are not there, but in teaching the student
how to see the genuine relations that do exist. Associations of
students, executives, bowlers, and chamber music enthusiasts
are related to the larger social system. And awareness of the
nature and scope of these relations is an achievement, not an
immediate object of observation. It requires intellectual skills
that can and should be the primary objectives of a school system
in contemporary America.

SUMMABY

A sense of self becomes problematical for men and women
whose relations to other people are tangential and fleeting, whose
distinctive individual traits evoke no response in the social world,
whose self -commitment must be expressed in symbols that have
no organic, historical connection with day-to-day life. The anti-

278 ; Education and Commitment

modernists build on these problematical features an attack against
the entire social and economic bases of an urban industrial cul-
ture. The anti-modernist is fundamentally mad, no matter how
cleverly he tries to conceal it.

A firm and healthy sense of self and its sine qua non ? a firm,
healthy relation to the people and things around one, are ex-
emplified in the effective production team, a peculiarly modern
phenomenon. Only when Americans will learn to see the corporate
world of work and production not as set bureaucratic hierarchies
but as complexly interwoven production teams shall we be able
to understand what commitment ought to mean today and thus
reduce somewhat the psychic costs we are now paying for our
success as a nation. Notice we said learn to see the corporate
world. This means new and better intellectual disciplines, a con-
ception of formal education radically different from the one that
served us in transition from our agrarian past. In the next chapter
we outline the new disciplines we see as inherent in the life of
contemporary man.

13

EDUCATION

FOR
COMMITMENT

We have indicated that commitment is not a state of personal
feelings but rather a particular configuration of four structural
elements including a person, an external world, the relations
between these two, and the symbolic system by which the person
can understand the world and his relations to it We have been
concerned to show that these elements are actually present within
some of the dominant institutions of the society. And now our
analysis must go somewhat deeper, so that we may determine just
what configuration of these elements constitutes commitment.
For whereas every fully socialized, that is to say every fully
human, individual exists within some kind of configuration of
these four elements, it is surely to miss the whole point of this
book (and, more importantly, to misunderstand the society this
book is designed to illuminate) to say that every individual exists

280 : Education and Commitment

within a system of commitment. Hence, we must distinguish what
sort of configuration we are calling one of commitment.

Where does one begin as he tries to establish some stability
in kaleidoscopic permutations among these elements? Many
serious and dedicated scholars have taken the person to be the
fixed point around which a viable configuration of the other
elements could be established. The notion that there is a fixed
entity which we call "human nature/* that its healthy or right
states can be distinguished from their opposites, and that all the
other elements can and should be so ordered as to bring out the
highest potentiality in human nature have long been encountered
in the traditions of Western social philosophy. 1 There is more
than a grain of truth in these notions, but there is a danger of mad-
ness in them too, for nothing so characterizes a philosopher as
the tendency to conceive of his own unique traits as the highest
form of human nature.

Others have taken human relations as the starting point. 2 This
approach becomes particularly appealing to common sense in an
age such as ours when smoothness in interpersonal relations figures
so prominently as a conscious desideratum. For the contemporary
American man or woman, the question: Are you happy? is taken
to mean: Are your relations with other people smooth and har-
monious? Yet common sense, on sober second thought, would
not say that ease in interpersonal contacts, any more than happi-
ness itself, is to be achieved by making it either a goal to be
aimed at or a starting point for social analysis. On the contrary,
interpersonal harmony is a quality occurring when other, more
fundamental, matters are ordered properly.

In the political sphere, the most usual approach to commitment
is to begin with varying symbol systems. "Africa for Africans,'*
"free enterprise/' "the coming victory of the proletariat," "The
American way" such slogans are taken not only as the proper
way to arouse feelings of commitment but as the proper objects
of commitment itself. But this cannot be taken seriously. In Japan,
Western Europe, and America surely, in the Soviet Union most
likely, and in other areas of the world within a short time, the

Education for Commitment : 281

age of ideology is ended. 3 Even propaganda such as Goebbels
practiced is a rather quaint anaclironism. Ours is an age of
advertising, and the target of advertising soon learns to close his
senses to its onslaught As the onslaught increases in intensity
or subtlety, the victim's senses become impervious to all symbolic
appeals; a debasement of the currency of social communication
has been effected. Thus, to take a symbol system for our starting
point is to be avoided on purely practical grounds: an advertising
approach to commitment would be inescapable, and an advertis-
ing approach is inevitably self-defeating. 4

This leaves the world of people and things as a candidate
for a starting point in the analysis of commitment. It is not
accidental that the great theologians have always appealed to
man from the standpoint of a description of the most funda-
mental features of the world as a whole. 5 For the Judaic-Chris-
tian tradition, man and the world are God's creations; that is the
most fundamental thing one can say, that is the starting point
for any approach to man's commitment.

Likewise the great atheists have begun with the world of
men and things. Nietzsche and George Bernard Shaw have taken
the evolution of the Life Force as that feature of the world which
demands commitment simply by virtue of its primordial existence.
For Marx that feature is called history and treated in the cate-
gories of dialectical materialism.

We mention these neither to endorse nor condemn them but
rather to indicate that our approach starting with the existing
world of men and things is not mere eccentricity. It is also to
recognize the dangers inherent in trying to treat so profound a
matter so briefly and yet to avoid superficiality, oversimplication,
and conceit.

No one would want to claim that anyone could or should be
committed to the world as a whole. If there is a God, there must
be a Devil; the Life Force is opposed by Inertia, Eros by
Thanatos, the Revolution by the Counterrevolution. Any analysis
that begins with what the world really is must recognize that it
contains a number of things, some worthy and some unworthy of

282 : Education and Commitment

commitment. Yet is dualism the proper scheme in which to in-
tellectualize the complexity of life? Can we use the Hegelian
dialectic without seriously distorting what we meant to describe?

Taking the world in a social, as opposed to a cosinologicaL,
sense, we see clearly that no dualism, no dialectic is quite ade-
quate. We must grapple directly with the complexity and sepa-
rateness of things as we encounter them in the social system of
the metropolitan world. Yes, social system! 6 Here is the world
with which we must begin, and however great the temptation
to slip into easy absolutes drawn from our hopes and dreams,
the temptation must be resisted and the reality confronted.

The social system of contemporary America is a peculiar
amalgam of vast, impersonal superstructures pursuing various
and often conflicting goals; it is a slowly standardizing settle-
ment pattern with differentiated neighborhood subcultures; it is
the intensity of human interaction within the nuclear family; it
is the confusing matrix out of which every boy and girl must
develop a sense of selfhood and a capacity to relate that self
to others; it is the fundamental, overriding fact which must be
fully accepted before commitment can be discussed or education
begin.

Only when the brute, ineluctable is-ness of our social system
is accepted, can we see what sort of ordering of the elements we
started with could properly be called commitment. We may
begin with this principle: none of the symbols derived from our
agrarian heritage adequately mediates the complexity and variety
of the metropolitan world. So we may leave the matter of symbol
systems to the last, to be considered after we have seen the order-
ing of the other elements.

COMMITMENT AND EXPERIENCE

A person is an individual man or woman, black or white, young
or old, keener or duller of intellect, beautiful or ugly or in-be-
tween, highly sensitive or less so in response to beauty, love, and
justice. What kind of relation can any person, each possessing

Education for Commitment : 283

many limitations and potentialities, have to so complex a reality
as is our social system? One answer is mere inclusion. Any
person can be in a society but not of it the relation Aristotle
defined as slavery. 7 This relation admits of no commitment, as
we are using the term. The opportunity offered to immigrants
to join the American social order as full members of it was, and
still is, the most significant anti-slavery cause in the history of
the human race.

Dismissing mere inclusion in the social system as an answer, is
a genuinely meaningful relation possible between the specifically
characterized individual and the vast social order of metropolitan
culture? We believe that such a relation is possible, but it is differ-
ent from that encountered in an agrarian world, different from the
assumed relation that lies behind contemporary education. For
the contemporary American, the possibility of experiencing the
range of basic forms within the social order in his own personal
life is nonexistent. Full recognition and acceptance of this feature
of the world is again crucial to our whole analysis. Relating
oneself to American society is not a matter merely of participat-
ing as a member of some segment of it and then extending that
participation to the whole. The society does not admit of that
sort of relation.

Did it ever? In a rather clear sense, it did. Consider any func-
tional subsystem in the agrarian society commerce, politics,
military, etc. In each of these, the individual who was a full par-
ticipant in the social order of his locality had a direct experience
of the same basic form of social organization wherever found in
the society. Relating oneself to another as buyer-and-seller was
the same form of relation whether found in the backwoods of
Illinois or in the large-scale mercantile marts of Boston and New
York. Similarly in politics, the election, deliberations, and actions
of a county court possessed the same form as its counterparts in
the state capital or in Washington. Experience as a member of
the local militia gave one a clear sense of the basic form of mili-
tary organization wherever found in the society. 8

This contrast with an agrarian past gives us a clearer meaning

284 ; Education and Commitment

for the sort of relation we can begin with in defining commitment
for our own times. It is distinctly not that of merely reproducing
in one's personal experience the basic forms of social organization
found everywhere in the society. It is, rather, the intellectualiza-
tion of one's own experience, abstracting and re-ordering the data
from personal observation so that different forms may be grasped
and understood. In contrast with agrarian society, in which the
direct and experienced relation between the individual and his
social world defined commitment, the counterpart relation in
metropolitan culture is indirect rather than direct, cognitive
rather than emotive, partially rather than fully participative, sym-
bolically constructed rather than historically experienced.

We have now seen two of the elements that go into the compo-
sition of commitment a world that comes to us in the guise of
metropolitan culture and a relation that must be built deliber-
ately if it is to exist at all. Before we can continue the analysis
and show how the other two elements the person and the sym-
bol system must be ordered if commitment is to be achieved, we
must turn to education. For the deliberate building of the rela-
tion necessary to commitment, as we have seen, involves a
peculiarly intellectual conception of education, and it is from the
educational requirements of this relation that conceptions of
person and symbol systems must be derived. 9

COMMITMENT THROUGH EDUCATION

Those who have followed our analysis to this point must have
gained a quite pessimistic outlook. Commitment in contemporary
culture would seem to involve knowledge and attitudes never be-
fore found on any sizeable scale In the history of mankind. Surely
the conclusion must be drawn that commitment is an inappropri-
ate term; we seem to be reduced to thinking of most people as
slaves in Aristotle's sense.

There would be excellent reasons for holding this pessimistic
view if one surveys only the actualities of the present political,
economic, and educational scene. But if one also attends to the

Education for Commitment : 285

potentialities of the modern world, pessimism is tempered some-
what. The potentialities of society are, as always, educational in
nature. Specifically: we now have some reason to believe that the
mental and emotional habits necessary to relating oneself to a
complex world can be institutionalized, can be taught in sufficient
degree to a sufficiently large number to make commitment pos-
sible, slavery avoidable.

To explain what these potentialities are, we should prefer to
look at education in a quasi-developmental fashion, i.e. to trace
through the stages of a learner's life and show what education
could, in principle do, at each stage. The treatment here is sum-
mary and schematic, an extension of the analysis given in previ-
ous chapters.

PRESCHOOL CHILDHOOD

We have already discussed the family in contemporary Ameri-
can culture from several perspectives. What does the child learn
there that may contribute to the long-term goal of relating him to
his total society? We suggest three kinds of learning of particular
importance.

i. The child can learn that love is possible, even to modern
man. Love can penetrate the peculiar alternation of solicitude and
neglect that is structurally inescapable in the usual forms of child-
rearing in our society. The trouble is, however, that in its search
for love a family may take the route of escape from the larger
society. The potentiality both for full participation in the love-
bound family of modern culture and for escape from its atavistic
and regressive pressures can be achieved for most people only in
the early years of living in a family. Love, warmth, security such
terms are necessary for describing the proper educational environ-
ment of a home. We have demonstrated the structural signifi-
cance of these interpersonal forces in a highly mobile society in
which the nuclear family is the basic unit of mobility. We leave,
to the large and growing body of specialists who make this their

286 : Education and Commitment

field, practical suggestions for strengthening the positive and
weakening the restrictive forces in modern family living. 10

2. The child must learn a vague and permeating sense of dis-
satisfaction with himself and his environment. When this attitude
concerns matters of the intellect, our language has a very positive
word for it: curiosity. But in interpersonal relations and relations
between a child and his material environment, we are more likely
to conceive of dissatisfaction as a negative thing. We often fail
to reward it when it appears; we teach it with methods that may,
in fact, turn it into negative channels.

We do reward and thus reinforce the child's attempts to in-
crease his limited powers to control certain things in the world
around him, as his clothes when he tries to dress himself, his
blocks when he builds, his speech when he tries to communicate
his thoughts. One is reminded of Erik Erikson's moving anecdote
of the young Sioux Indian child (three or four years old), who
was told to close the door. 11 It was just within, her power to do
it, and her father waited patiently while she did the task slowly
and with great exertion. Any feelings of dissatisfaction she may
have had were ignored; she was learning, as Erikson would have
us see the story, to trust her powers to do what had to be done
in the world.

An American father is unlikely to behave in this way and, even
less so, his daughter. She would evince frustration and aggres-
sion; he would reinforce her undesirable behavior either by doing
her task for her or by expressing counter-aggression toward her,
if, indeed, he didn't turn away from the whole enterprise once
difficulty appeared. The American child would be learning, in
any event, the same general and vague dissatisfaction that her
mother must show toward the whole world, a feeling that has the
most profound connections with the structure and processes of a
dynamic, mobile society. The very bright and competent mother
finds her powers ill-used in doing tasks that are mostly repetitive
and monotonous. The less bright and incompetent mother finds
herself unable to perform up to the level made mandatory by the
mass media which express the goals of the most able and efficient

Education for Commitment : 287

women. In any case, a sense of dissatisfaction is inescapable in
the role itself, and this is transmitted to and reinforced in the
child

3. The child must learn a clear sense of the distinction between
the inside and outside of things; we might say a feeling for the
partiality of perspective. This is easiest to describe by contrasts.
An infant in some cultures is swaddled, in other cultures left
naked and allowed to go about freely when not held by human
arms. Among ns the infant's clothes put little restrictions on his
movements, but he is left for a considerable part of his time in
enclosed spaces. These spaces cribs, playpens, nurseries are his
alone, and nearly always they allow vision to the outside. We do
not shut the door on him; we use specially designed gates that
prevent his movement but offer no restrictions on his sight. On
city streets we use strollers that serve the same purpose.

As the child leaves physically enclosed spaces, he learns to live
in psychically restricted areas, recognizing always that there is an
inside where freedom is not a problem but a given condition, and
an outside to which one may look and from which others are
watching without hindering or hurting those within.

The child moving in a stroller is the prototype of the mobile
adult; he travels not nakedly in the world but inside a device which
offers definite restrictions on his movement but also protection
from the rough edges of things outside. He learns to complain
effectively against its limitations, not with the object of seeking
absolute freedom but of securing limited goals that are directly
visible to him. Just so the nuclear family serves to limit and shield
the mobile adult; it provides an inside of freedom for the expres-
sion of personal needs, and it remains distinguished from the out-
side to which it offers openings for vision. The picture window
and the television screen, magazines, newspapers, neighborhood
interaction, and jobs are all equally, but differently, ways in which
the family admits access to the outside world without placing its
own uniqueness in too great jeopardy. The nuclear family seeks a
house in the suburbs in lieu of a city apartment, not to abolish
but rather to expand and strengthen the walls which separate it

288 : Education and Commitment

from the outside. There is, as many observers have noted, a fine
line to be drawn between madness and sanity in this behavior. 12
Are these three love, dissatisfaction, and the inside-outside
feeling all that need to be learned in the preschool years? Of
course not This is the period of most rapid learning of verbal,
social, and motor skills. This is the period during which the
bases are laid for all subsequent relations with peers and for all
future self -insight. We have mentioned these three because they
are not usually discussed when the relations of infancy and early
childhood to social structure are under consideration. 13

FIRST YEARS OF SCHOOL

The early years in school help the child to "build the bridge"
between his home and the larger community, and a great deal
of the literature on the early years of schooling shows a quite
clear awareness that this relation between home and school is of
utmost importance. 14 This relation is the key fact against which
discussions of discipline, reading, social skills, and the like are
most usually cast

Occasionally one finds, however, a misleading image in these
discussions. Sometimes the movement through school is described
as a gradual widening by easy stages of the child's perspective
from the home, out into the neighborhood, thence to his wider
local community, area, region, and ultimately to the world as a
whole. Yet this metaphor of gradual widening is entirely inappro-
priate. The kindergarten and first-grade teachers do not represent
the life of the neighborhood to the child; rather do they present
to him, as directly as he will ever experience it, the real and ideal
world of adulthood. In this experience the child tests and proves
the inside-outside distinction he learned earlier. The charming
episodes of calling mother Miss So-and-So and vice versa, of be-
stowing and receiving love within the confines of the classroom,
of finding pride in new powers and frustration in their slowness
all these are not relating the child to his neighborhood but to pat-
terns of thought and action of the total society.

Education for Commitment . 239

In school the child moves through one classroom after another,
establishing and then breaking bonds with those who stand to
him as representatives of the larger social order. Some relations
last longer, some shorter, but even the first grader recognizes the
transitory character of every contact Here he learns, at first in
a purely emotional way, that smoothness and harmony in inter-
personal relations are essential to the whole system. His teachers
have been trained (though with varying degrees of effectiveness)
to avoid the wide oscillations between permissive and restrictive
control of children that are found in most homes. They are taught
to lower rather than raise their voices when seeking attention.
They treat emotional outbursts, especially those accompanied by
physical violence, as symptoms of some illness which is to be
treated by keeping the patient quiet and isolated from his peers
whom he might infect. For the main business of the classroom,
the difference between boys and girls is of little or no conse-
quence, though in play this difference may be the basis for sepa-
ration.

The main business? It is to learn to learn, just as later we shall
say that the main business of the whole social system is learning
itself. Until the child enters school, the outside world comes to
him as merely something to be sensed. He hears its noises coming
from the radio and phonograph; he sees it on his television screen
and through the windows of the family automobile. But it makes
no demands; it merely exists to be sensed and ingested.

But the school says: you must do something with this world.
You must classify your observations and speak of them intel-
ligibly to others; you must read, and draw, and build, and cal-
culate. You do these not only with the familiar materials of your
inside world but with the varied and strange matters that come
from the outside.

Very soon, just how soon is for specialists in childhood educa-
tion to say, the disciplines of the adult culture come to be im-
posed on the child*s ways of dealing with the observations and
impressions he receives. These disciplines are absolutely essential
to establishing the indirect, cognitive, and symbolic relation that

290 : Education and Commitment

lies at the basis of commitment in modern America. But how they
are to begin in a child's life is hard to say. Let us look at one
instance to see the degree of imposition involved. In Tom Sawyer
and in Smith's Where Did You Go? . . . one reads and then re-
members the peculiar discipline that boyhood peer culture ex-
ercises over beliefs. The discipline is that of ritual, incantation,
and unquestioning acceptance. Yes, this is the way warts are
cured. Yes, this is the way earthworms grow and the way marbles
are played. It does not matter that experience fails to confirm the
belief nor that the traditional rules introduce capricious elements
in the game. A peer group is not concerned with such matters but
with the exact transmission of its beliefs and practices.

In most societies of the world, it would appear, adult culture
is of the same order. Its beliefs and practices differ from those of
the childhood culture of the same society, but both are essentially
static. Initiating the young man or woman into adult culture is
merely a matter of changing his or her beliefs and practices; it
is not, as with us, a matter of introducing entirely different forms
of disciplining beliefs and practices.

The perishing of any culture creates a certain nostalgia, es-
pecially among those who experienced its values. The dissolution
of peer cultures of prepubertal childhood is proceeding apace;
its passing is mourned less in public than in the private conversa-
tions of men and women who regret that their children do not
play the old games, who complain of the over-organization of
childhood life in metropolitan society. But, regrets aside, it is
clear that Little League Baseball has a more rational and just
discipline than one-eyed cat It is clear that nature study groups
sponsored by the YMCA stand in closer accord to scientific ob-
servation than did the informal river gangs of agrarian boyhood.

The disciplines of experimentation, rational interpretation of
observation, and impartiality of justice have penetrated the world
of childhood. How this penetration may be brought under con-
scious control in schools and accomplished with a minimum loss
of those values of spontaneity and mystery found in the childhood

Education for Commitment : 291

cultures of an earlier era are questions deserving study by educa-
tors and social scientists.

In the later years of childhood, that period Harry Stack Sullivan
called the "quiet miracle of pre-adolescence/ 7 instruction comes
to be the dominant mode of educational activity. 15 Very likely
there is no aspect of our culture so little disciplined by scientific
and ethical considerations as is instruction. Let us merely assert
some of the fundamental principles at this point:

i. Instruction is not a matter of stuffing the head of a youngster.
It is a relational affair, specifically a connection between what a
learner does and the consequences of doing it. The closer and
clearer this connection, the more effective the instruction.

2,. Youngsters vary in the rate at which they can effectively par-
ticipate in instruction. There is probably some correlation be-
tween rate and total capacity, but the degree of correlation is
not known. It is unquestionably true that every learner could ad-
vance much further in any field of instruction if he were allowed
to proceed at his own most effective rate.

3. It is clear that a classroom of the usual size and composition
is more adequately adapted to the perpetuation of a traditional
culture one based on ritual, incantation, and unquestioning ac-
ceptance than it is to giving instruction in the disciplines of
science and rational ethics,

4. Instruction in the disciplines of our culture is not so much a
matter of training in predetermined responses to predetermined
stimuli as it is that of giving the learner reasons for the beliefs
he accepts from others and constructs for himself.

In order to make the best use of this period, when youngsters
are most capable of participating in the instructional process, we
shall have to give up a great many of our traditionally based
practices, with consequent implications for the structure of the
teaching profession. 16 We may take it for granted that automated
teaching can and will assume an increasingly significant part of the
instructional task. The use of mechanical devices for individual in-
struction is inescapable if the principles listed above are to be
acted on. Yet is there no way to use the power of social reinforce-

292 : Education and Commitment

ment inherent in childhood groups for educational purposes? It
must be evident that the classroom teacher of the present time
does not, given present demands cannot, take full advantage of
the social force potential therein. The reason is equally evident:
for purposes of instructing youngsters in the disciplines of thought
and action that pertain to the adult society, social interaction
among the youngsters themselves is a distracting and disruptive
factor. This interaction must be carefully controlled in its times
and places of occurrence if it is not to destroy the effectiveness
of the teacher as he tries to carry on the main business of the
school, instruction.

For understanding the possible role of interaction, let us re-
phrase our question in this fashion: is it possible that the basic
forms of discipline in the adult culture could become the opera-
tive forms of discipline in a childhood peer culture so that the
educative power of the childhood society could be used to instill
these disciplines in every child? The argument one might give
for a negative answer is a rather powerful one: there are no his-
torical nor cross-cultural parallels for this form of discipline in
childhood cultures. The sort of evidence gathered by Jean Piaget
concerning the moral development of the child supports the view
(but in ways that are not yet well understood), that a discipline
based on ritual, incantation, and unquestioning acceptance is in-
herent in the very nature of any childhood culture. 17

The argument for a positive answer is that we have not tried
this approach on a krge enough scale to show that it cannot be
done. Furthermore, the historical and cross-cultural parallels for
a scientific and ethical discipline of adult thought and action have
appeared only recently, and these disciplines have yet to be com-
pletely triumphant even in our own culture.

Certainly the experiment would be worth trying. It would re-
quire rather extensive administrative changes, for example, the
elimination of rigid age-graded groupings for children, the sched-
uling of rather long blocks of time in which supervision by adults
is minimal, the provision of rich source materials for observation
and experimentation, and opportunities for movement through

Education for Commitment 2 293

Carious sorts of physical and social environments. It is evident
that most students of later childhood education think these
changes desirable, though usually for reasons different from those
given here. This would indicate that the proper climate for change
should not be too difficult to obtain.

ADOLESCENCE AND BEYOND

We are using the term adolescence to indicate a peculiar
Feature of American culture and not a biological event. There is,
of course, a biological basis for this cultural phenomenon, but it
does not pose its special educational problems merely because it
is a period of rapid physical growth during which emerge the
primary and secondary sexual characteristics of the adult man
and woman. This period poses special educational problems for
two reasons: i) It will see the termination of that period in which
formal education is conducted apart from occupational interests
and the beginning of the period in which formal education is
closely integrated with occupational pursuits, ii) It will constitute
the period in which the disciplines of thought and action of the
adult society become conscious and foundational to all future
learning.

Integration of Formal Education with Occupational Pursuits

There is no reason to hold that twelve or sixteen or any other
number of years of schooling constitute either too little or too
much education. Economically, years of full-time schooling for
any individual must be subtracted from his production. Will in-
creased capacity for production by that individual pay for these
years in the long run? For how many years? For what proportion,
what kind of people? We submit that while these questions may
be asked in an economic sense, they cannot be answered by eco-
nomic analysis. How many years of schooling does it take to pro-
duce a poet? How is his production to be measured? What is the
productive value of a corporation executive's learning to under-

294 : Education and Commitment

stand himself better through the study of literature and philos-
ophy? Or a lathe operator?

We tend to put questions like the proper number of years of
schooling in economic terms because we recognize that there is,
or rather ought to be, some demonstrable connection between
secondary education and adult life. Merely to repeat an inherited
curriculum generation after generation is no proper response to
the demand for education in our own day. If we can find a com-
mon unit to measure both the activities in school and those in
adult life, and economic productivity would appear to constitute
such a unit, then we have a sound basis for judging among com-
peting proposals for how much and what kind of schooling we
should provide at the secondary level and beyond.

Perhaps we may salvage the basically correct insight here with-
out having our gaze too restricted by a purely economic analysis.
The common unit that best applies to adolescence and adult life
in contemporary metropolitan culture is not productivity per se
but rather productive learning. Let us attempt to define produc-
tive learning by noting some obvious instances of its absence. A
worker whose skills have been rendered obsolete by technological
change and who lacks the attitude and motivation (though not
the intellectual capacity) for successful retraining somehow failed
to learn productively in his school career. So also a housewife
whose life becomes drab and meaningless when her children no
longer need her constant attention. So also the citizen who casts
his vote according to inherited prejudices rather than following
a reasoned appraisal of the alternatives open to him. So also the
young couple who commence to bear children merely because
our society is rich enough to sustain them.

The formula for productive learning is simple enough: give
instruction in the formal school system in such fashion that those
who receive it will continue to discipline their thought and action
in adult life as they were taught to do in school. The formula is
a counsel of perfection; every educational reformer since the
Sophists has urged it, largely without visible consequences. Two
circumstances in the present state of our culture, however, trans-

Education for Commitment : 295

form this formula into a requirement for cultural survival. First,
it is no longer the case that continued learning through adult
life is a necessity only for the minority of professional scholars. It
is now a necessity in the Me of everyone who would not be a
mere slave in the society he serves. Second, no longer can casual,
informal processes of learning enable an adult to change his
thought and action in response to the changes occurring around
him. Not only is change too rapid for this gradual process; it is
also too deep and penetrates too many aspects of life to permit an
adequate adjustment by untutored trial and error.

Mention of the professional scholar brings to mind the carica-
ture of the college lecturer who repeats to his classes the same
notes he copied from his professor. This we rightly label clear
dereliction of duty. Being a college professor requires not only
the performance of a certain task, e.g. lecturing, but also requires
continual increase in competence for the task through deliberate
efforts to learn. And the same requirement holds for any teacher,
any worker, housewife, citizen, parent, executive, in short for
every adult.

But the scholar has one great advantage. He was taught that
his job involves continuous self-education. He finds it not at all
strange to believe that in doing his job he must study the findings
of others and, more importantly, open his own eyes and dis-
cipline his observations. Into his formal education is built a
method and attitude that carry quite naturally into a lifetime of
productive learning. It does not weaken our case to point out
that the teaching is often ineffective. The vehemence with which
graduate schools are both attacked and defended shows clearly
our main point: willingness and ability for continuous self -educa-
tion are the measures of effectiveness of the formal education.

We must now face the really tough question: given the enor-
mous complexity of modern life and the explosive rate at which
new information is added to our culture, is it realistic to set the
goal of productive learning for every graduate of every sec-
ondary school and college when even graduate schools have such
difficulty in achieving it for a selected group and in restricted

296 : Education and Commitment

subject areas? This returns us to the attitude of tempered pes-
simism we mentioned just above. We do not believe the full ed-
ucational potential of our culture has been realized, and until it
has been tried more thoroughly than at present, we have no al-
ternative but to set this goal for our education and to strive for
its achievement.

Educational authorities in the Soviet Union have recognized
this need for integrating continued learning with productive
work and devised several plans by which youths from age sixteen
upward could carry on an occupation and study at the same
time. 18 These plans include alternate days of attendance at the
shop and school, special academic classes given on the premises
at larger factories, and a great expansion and reorganization of
evening and home study courses given under the supervision of
ministries of education in the various republics. These reforms are
strongly influenced by a desire to eliminate the idea that sec-
ondary education terminates schooling for all save the small
minority who enter a university or advanced technical school.
Secondary education ought to be, Soviet educators believe, a
period of transition to an adult life that includes continued
schooling as a matter of course. And this goal is set not for the
professional scholar alone but for all worker-citizens of the society.

Anyone who looks seriously at the educational demands of a
technological society may find instructive lessons from the ex-
perience of the Soviet educators over the next several years. But
quite apart from any political or ideological bias that would re-
ject the Soviet solution to this problem as it now stands, theirs is,
with only slight qualification, a purely mechanical solution; that
is to say, it is merely a joining of work and study without any
significant changes in either, just as two gears in a machine may
alternately mesh and unmesh without changing in themselves.
What we are proposing is much more radical. What we wish to
see, on one hand, is a reconstruction of content and method in
secondary and higher education, such that productive learning is
a usual and consciously prized result of study. On the other hand,
we wish to see changes in adult roles of worker, citizen, parent,

Education for Commitment . 297

and the like, such that the highest disciplines of thought and
action in our culture can function more effectively in the lives of
people and their institutions.

Disciplines of Thought and Action

We have used the expression "disciplines of thought and action*
quite loosely in this chapter. Now we must be a bit more precise,
even while recognizing that absolute precision is not possible
when speaking, as we are, programmatically.

We have contrasted the ritual and incantation of a childhood
culture with the disciplines of science and order that control
thought and action in a technological culture. In childhood games
a magic phrase, "King's X," brings special dispensations from the
rules. For the major sports of our society, committees continually
revise the rales so as to eliminate any special advantages that
might possibly accrue to any player or team. In childhood, beliefs
often are impervious to evidence; in modern science the very
meaning of a belief is found in the evidence which supports it.
We have shown how the progressives attempted to bring the dis-
ciplines of impartial justice and empirical science directly into
the common-sense world of men, a world which changed more
slowly than the technological world in which these disciplines had
already triumphed so spectacularly. With nearly a half century
of hindsight, we can see more clearly than they have what would
be needed to make their efforts come to full fruition.

There is a strong case for identifying the disciplines of thought
and action we are seeking with the academic disciplines, as
organized for research and instruction in graduate schools. In the
first place, these disciplines have showed extraordinary capacity
for generating new knowledge at an ever increasing rate. In the
second place, young men and women who become full par-
ticipants in an academic discipline tend to show the temper and
attitude we have characterized as the outcome of truly produc-
tive learning. Respectable physicists, of course, do make
ordinarily stupid statements on public policy matters, but very

298 : Education and Commitment

likely the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy would have to
cease functioning if it lacked the support of men and women
whose minds have been formed under the aegis of academic disci-
plines.

(It is idle chatter to introduce the bogey of transfer of training
into this discussion. Whatever results one may encounter in labora-
tory tests of memory power or the retention of information
learned apart from any use of it, the fact remains that long and
serious education in any of the academic disciplines has a per-
meating effect on the mind and character of those who receive
it. To deny this would be a mild form of insanity. )

To equate the disciplines of thought and action that we must
try to instill in our contemporary adolescents with the academic
disciplines, however, is to turn the whole matter upside down.
By their very nature the academic disciplines tend to proliferate
and specialize, requiring of those who would learn them a
restriction of interest and attention, whereas the disciplines of
thought and action we are seeking have the world as their com-
pass. It is all right to say that teaching in secondary schools
is a simplification of the same disciplines that in more com-
plicated form are taught in graduate schools. But it is not
very helpful to say so. Let us rather say that the highest level
of research and instruction in our society whether found in
graduate schools, industrial laboratories, or elsewhere is but
a refinement and specialized application of the more fundamental
disciplines of thought and action inherent in the very structure
of our social order. These more fundamental disciplines, we be-
lieve, can be analyzed and taught directly, allowing their
specialized uses to come in due course in a citizen's life.

A detailed analysis of these disciplines is outside our present
purposes. But we may suggest the following scheme for subse-
quent investigation.

i) The formal disciplines of logic and mathematics: These are
called "formal'* in a special sense, i.e, because the form of argu-
ment determines whether or not the argument is to be accepted.
It is an inescapable fact about our culture that our knowledge

Education for Commitment : 299

of the physical world comes to us in arguments having mathe-
matical or hypothetico-deductive -form. The man or woman who
cannot follow a mathematical argument is utterly precluded from
understanding, as our culture interprets understanding, why the
planets appear in their appointed plans, how a rheostat functions,
what it means to say that a theory or a theorem has been proved.
We need say little about the teaching of the formal disciplines;
the need for them is recognized, and ingenious pedagogy to raise
them to the level of explicit consciousness is rapidly proceeding.

ii) The discipline of experimentation: The formal disciplines,
as it is customary to say, do not determine the truth of any
statement about the world. They merely guarantee that the rea-
soning is cogent, while truth ultimately depends on observations
made under the guidance of reasoning.

The customary way of speaking is correct., as far as it goes. But
the actual story of experimentation in our society is of a different
order altogether from what might be thought if one saw it
merely as the testing of hypotheses derived from formal argu-
ments. It is not too much to say that experiment has become a
style of life, a way of looking at the world: in principle, every
phenomenon that man encounters can be analyzed into a set of
causal factors and the force of each factor measured. If the
results of experiment can be organized into logico-mathematical
theories, so much the better, but experiment does not wait on
theory. 19 From the simplest home garden plot to vast state farms,
from the tinkering of a shop mechanic to the organized industrial
laboratory, from the schoolboy's chemistry set to Du Pont or
Cape Canaveral experiment never ceases. "What causes it to
go?** is a question implying that there is one factor to be found,
if only we are ingenious and persistent enough in our search
for it

Dirty hand, sweaty brows, tired muscles, and finally, a rapid
pulse when the results are at hand these are the dramatic con-
comitants of elections and other experiments. But even more
significant to experimentation are the elements of design. It is in
design that the heart of the discipline is to be found, whether

300 : Education and Commitment

the experiment concerns the physical, biological, social, or per-
sonal aspects of the world. It is scarcely necessary to point out
how little this discipline has penetrated the ordinary secondary
school program. It is a saddening sight to observe well-ordered
high school laboratories where youngsters copy set procedures
listed in workbooks and change their figures to get results match-
ing what their textbook says ought to obtain. It is even sadder to
observe no social and psychological laboratory at all in most high
schools. To devise techniques of pedagogy to make the discipline
of experiment, especially its design, a living force in the thought
of young men and women is one of our crucial tasks in education.

iii) The discipline of natural history: It is far simpler to see a
phenomenon, any sort of phenomenon, as a function of one causal
factor which can be isolated by experiment than it is to see that
same phenomenon as the outcome of a process in which many
systemically intertwined factors are operating. Consider a simple
thing, say, the regular occurrence of a certain pigmentation in a
fruit fly. In principle, if not yet in fact, we can explain this
phenomenon experimentally by isolating the particular gene, the
molecule of DNA, which is causally effective in producing the
pigmentation. Holding other factors constant, if a change in the
molecular structure of the gene brings about a change in pig-
mentation, then we may say, with all the drama such a statement
allows, that the cause has been isolated.

But suppose we approached the same phenomenon with differ-
ent questions: What is the significance of this pigmentation in
the relation between this little organism and its complex environ-
ment? Why, from all the colors of the rainbow, did the fruit fly
come to have one, and only one, typical pattern of pigmentation?
Answers to these questions are subject to the discipline of natural
history. They would involve narrative of a very particular kind,
one in which organism and environment are seen to maintain a
viable relation despite the changes gradual and cataclysmic
that occur in the latter. We lack the evidence on which to
construct a narrative that will explain the pigmentation of a fruit
fly, but for man and his plan in the natural world, the discipline

Education for Commitment ; 301

of natural history is our only guide to a satisfactory explanation.

Much nonsense has been written (and likely will continue to
be written) by those who choose to look at societies as organisms,
being born, growing, and finally decaying. Natural history does
not take the individual organism as its unit but rather the system
of interrelationships exemplified in the organism. Natural history,
like Nature itself, is unconcerned with the individual; its focus
is on the complex, in which one system maintains its organization
as a system by responding both to its own internal dynamics and
to its changing relations to larger systems of which it is a part.

Single-factor interpretations of historical processes are always
false. The demise of the saber-toothed tiger can be explained
only when one sees what the tiger did to its environment as well
as what the environment did to it. Technology becomes a dynamic
force in social change only when it occurs within a certain
system of relations to other natural and social factors. An urban
slum is not caused in any simple sense at all; it is rather a sub-
system sustaining many complex relations to the larger system
of which it is a part. Corn is grown in Iowa and wheat in Kansas,
but anyone who gives a simple climatological explanation of this
phenomenon misses the point altogether.

The discipline of thought required to explain phenomena in
this way is hard to achieve, harder still to teach. We have at-
tempted to exemplify the discipline of natural history in this
book, with what success we must allow our critics to decide. Our
experience in trying to teach this discipline to others gives clear
guidance on only one point: students who would achieve it
must themselves open their eyes and see the world around them
with quickened imagination and perception; they must attempt
to construct the narrative for themselves and suffer defeat by the
one stubborn fact which refuses to fit in its assigned place. This
discipline, like all the others, cannot be poured into the heads o
students.

iv) The discipline of esthetic form: Without logic and mathe-
matics our culture would be unintelligible to itself. Without the
constant search for causes and for systems the rest of world

302 : Education and Commitment

natural and historical would be unintelligible chaos. Yet dis-
ciplined thought and action are not complete without discipline
in the unique creation, the esthetic object which is sustained by
its own internal relations, quite apart from its causes (and, of
course, it is caused) and from the systemic relations it bears to
other objects and events.

We may recognize three aspects to this discipline: There is,
first, confrontation, the discipline of isolating the esthetic object
for contemplation (or as ZifiE would generalize it, for "aspec-
tion/*) 20 One may confront a painting, a sonata, a ballet, or a
sunset; but in any case one must learn to confront: to isolate and
frame the object, to achieve detachment so as to see or hear or
feel the object as it is in itself. There is, second, construction.
If the esthetic object is anything that sustains the attitude of
confrontation (as classical Chinese scholars are said to gaze for
hours at a lump of amber), the art object is that which a human
being constructs deliberately. The imagination to envisage new
possibilities in familiar materials, the courage to abandon past
success for a perilous unknown, the sheer technical skill and
energy to carry through, and the moral integrity to abjure the
phony pleasantry in solving the problems set by the matter at
hand these are marks of discipline in the artist.

There is, third, criticism. Disciplined criticism is at the op-
posite pole from the frequently heard: "I don't know anything
about art, but I know what I like/' How can one know what he
likes until he knows what art is? Art consists of objects constructed
from the possibilities and limited by the brute facts of certain
materials, certain functions, and certain historical traditions. Until
one can criticize in this temper, he has no idea what he likes or
does not like.

The discipline of esthetic form poses certain unique educational
problems. There are many art forms in our culture, and each of
them requires long and assiduous study if one is to internalize
the discipline of that form. Mathematics, experiment, and natural
history can be generalized as disciplines of thought, but it is
doubtful that the same is true of the arts. It seems rather more

Education for Comanitmezii : 303

likely that the aspects of this discipline must be learned in
very close relation to some one art form. We can see these aspects
of the discipline applying to poetry and painting, symphonies
and sculpture, drama, ballet, and architecture. We cannot see
how an adolescent could learn them in this general fashion
unless, or until, he had achieved a certain level of discipline
In some one of them. The pedagogical problem here would, then,
appear to be that of teaching the discipline of esthetic form in
some one art, but teaching it in a way that encourages the
individual student to seek this degree of discipline in his approach
to other art forms in the culture.

These, in fine, are the disciplines of thought an adolescent must
acquire if he is to have learned productively. Although we have
presented them separately, it is easy to see that they overlap and
interrelate all through. We have purposely not discussed these
disciplines in behavioral, operational terms. Just how one would
sample behavior at any age level to judge the degree to which
these disciplines had been acquired is a neat problem for experi-
mental design, but it is outside our purpose here. What one
would do to teach these disciplines, what students would do to
learn them are also questions outside our immediate purview.
Nor are we even suggesting that these disciplines could serve
as a basis for curriculum organization in secondary schools and
colleges; other personal, social, and linguistic skills are necessary,
and they could not be fitted easily into a curriculum organized
on these lines.

For one who has learned these disciplines consciously and pro-
ductively, commitment to American culture is at last possible. For
these disciplines are not merely (if indeed they are at all)
academic studies. Rather they are the primordial rules of thought
that guide our most fundamental interpretations of the world.
They are the substitutes in the contemporary world for the
gossip and sorcery of primitive village Me; that is to say, these
disciplines are for us institutionally legitimate modes of social
control. 21 A person who accepts these disciplines as integral
to his own thinking and accepts the world as it is revealed through

304 : Education and Commitment

these disciplines has indeed established that relation to the
world that deserves the title commitment.

We are convinced that the teaching of these disciplines is the
prime obligation of our school system, for these are the disciplines
of the public world. 22 They would never be learned simply by
growing up in a nuclear family, a form of association disciplined
mostly by the ad hoc adjustment of personalities. The mass
media, serving the exploitative and predatory interests of busi-
ness corporations, cannot be counted on to teach those disci-
plines which, in their internal affairs, they demand of their own
employees. The dissolution of adult community means that there
is no readily visible model of adult behavior that can be imitated
by the young. Professionalized and specialized, the erstwhile
community now looks to the school to do the educating it has
lost the capacity for.

We are not, then, too concerned that the number four be taken
as exactly the proper way to divide up the disciplines integral
to our social order, but that these disciplines be recognized as
having first claim on the limited time, intelligence, and money
that we devote to education on this point we are adamant

14

MORAL
COMMITMENT

AND THE
INDIVIDUAL

We have made our proposals. The final part of our task is to de-
fend our analysis against the obvious charge that commitment
is something other than the purely intellectual or cognitive activi-
ties we have described under the heading of "disciplines.'' Com-
mitment is a matter of guts, of will and heart, the objection runs;
commitment means a certain state of the emotions and not
merely of the mind, as our argument would lead one to believe.
Let us meet this objection head on. It is an idea that is deep-
rooted in our culture, and we shall have to make several detours
to show why it is entirely misplaced. We shall have to show the
radical difference between commitment in our culture and com-
mitment as it exists in other cultures. We shall have to offer an
interpretation of individuality and individual responsibility that
is different from the one our culture inherited from its agrarian

306 : Education and Commitment

past. With these arguments we shall make our case proof against
the objections that seem, at first glance, so destructive.

THE NEW MEANING TO MORAL

The world of contemporary metropolitan culture does not mani-
fest itself to its new members as the great forces of the natural
world manifested themselves to youths among the Plains Indians.
Prayer, fasting, and solitary vigils now produce only giddiness
and headaches; they vouchsafe not visions but vertigo. This is a
pity, of course, but there it is.

The world today permits itself to be directly seen only in frag-
ments. Its larger, more abiding features are abstract; they must be
constructed in the mind, not perceived by the senses. Unlike the
world of Irish familism, unlike the Navaho world of personal
striving for adulthood, unlike any other world in which a whole
society has been forced to live the world of the contemporary
American never permits its basic structure to be reproduced in
the ordinary life and affairs of men and women.

Yet all too often we still speak and think of commitment as if it
were the sort of dedication shown by the Irish peasant toward
the preservation of his family's hold on the land. We see the
steady disintegration of this sort of direct relation between a per-
son and the demands of his world, and we complain that the
contemporary world creates mass man, lacking in commitment,
without roots in the realities of the world he inhabits. We decry
conformity; we denounce anomie. 1 In short, we we who would
speak to and for education fail to see the truth about our own
world and the kind of commitment it permits and requires.

Gognitively, our world includes the disciplines by which it
can be known. They differ from the disciplines of fasting, prayer,
interpersonal loyalty, and self-sacrifice. They are, rather, the
wholly impersonal disciplines of scientific experimentation, of
natural history, esthetic form and mathematics. They are terrify-
ing disciplines, for they permit no ultimate certainty, no relaxa-
tion into the "oceanic feeling" of being at one with the entire

Moral Commitment and the Individual : 307

universe. 2 Their findings enlarge and change at a dizzying pace:
today's most basic theories become uninteresting special cases
tomorrow.

But this is no cause for despair. If even our extended lifetime
gives us only a small glimpse into att the complexities of the world
we now inhabit, these glimpses still surpass in richness of texture
and order of pattern anything that might have been guessed by
our ancestors. What does it matter that our vision of the natural
world makes all mankind seem a rather irrelevant cosmic acci-
dent? A cognitive grasp of the natural and social world, unfettered
by illusions of personal significance, can now be the normal,
routine achievement of all men and women. In previous ages and
cultures only the extraordinary mystic or scholar could accomp-
lish this. If there is a good in universal education, surely this is
part of it.

There are, of course, those who claim that scientific rationality,
even in its broadest sense, gives only a partial, even a distorted
view of the world. If they mean that there is an illuminative
quality in the arts that is different from the light of scientific
reason, their claim is true. But it is not damaging to our insistence
that, in the purely cognitive sense, scientific rationality is the
sovereign, supreme, jealously unique discipline for apprehending
the physical and social world. If the truism that there is more to
human life than mere cognition seems significant, it may be
reiterated as often as one likes. Still our point is this: one aspect
of commitment in the contemporary world is cognition. It is,
moreover, the prerequisite without which all the other relations
between a person and his world could not add up to commitment.
A man or woman might have tbe most positive feelings toward
this society, might work with assiduous self-sacrifice for its wel-
fare, might pray for it each day, and yet all these would not
constitute commitment to our culture in the absence of a ration-
ally disciplined, objective grasp of the fundamentally impersonal
structures and processes that constitute our physical and social
world.

The world in which we live can be known only by rationally

308 : Education and Commitment

ordered disciplines for which science in its broad sense is the
prototype. One could say, then, that the touchstone of our
analysis is the relation between the individual and his world, Le.
that scientific, rational knowledge of the world is the basic
relation from which conceptions of the world, personality, and
symbol systems are derived. One could say this, but we choose
to put it the other way for this reason: the objectivity of rational
thought means that it is a part of the world external to any indi-
vidual To learn how the world is organized, what forms, pat-
terns, and regularities are to be apprehended in the environment,
means to accept an external discipline for one's cognitions. It isn't
necessary that a world be of this sort; the world of Irish f amilism
and Navaho self-proving were different. We believe the difference
is better described by saying that these are different social and
material worlds, each of which makes its distinctive demands for
a particular kind of person and a particular kind of symbolic
expression.

What relation, then, between an individual person and his
world is demanded by the world of contemporary metropolitan
culture? Clarity, vigor, and breadth of thought as discussed under
the disciplines of education? These, of course, are essential; with-
out them the world is not, and chaos obtains. But is nothing be-
yond knowledge necessary? Other social and material worlds
have demanded obedience, reverence, devotion, self-abnegation,
love, sacrifice, prayer. . . . Does our world demand only disciplined
thought?

Not quite. But it doesn't demand any of these other forms of
worship. In fact it makes worship very difficult. Awe and respect
are almost inevitable concomitants of the disciplined study of
anything, but worship is a quite personal relation between wor-
shiper and object worshiped. The world as it reveals itself through
the disciplines of science, history, and criticism is not personal.
For a person who simply will worship, the human imagination can
find attributes of personality in virtually anything a stone, a
statue, or constellations of stars. Our world is supremely indif-
ferent in this regard. Its richness and order may be worshiped or

Moral Commitment and the Individual ; 309

not; It neither demands nor prohibits this relation. Freedom of
worship is thus to be seen as a structural feature of the world of
metropolitan culture.

But are there no demands of a distinctly moral character in the
very structure of our culture? Yes and no. Let us state the nega-
tive side of the answer first. The recognition of a social system
in which social functions are performed irrespective of the per-
sonal motives of those who have specific roles in the system was
one of Marx's keenest and most enduring insights. (This insight
need not be associated with the naive detenninism and linear
causation found elsewhere in Marx. 3 ) A school, a corporation, or
political unit simply could not operate if its operation depended
on a unanimity of motives in those who perform its functions. It
operates on its own internal logic and structure. When it fails
to operate well, we seek to improve it by changing its structure:
by reorganizing it. We got rid of hereditary kingship and
hereditary control of business enterprises because those systems
do tend to elevate the personal motives of leaders to greater struc-
tural significance than mobile, technological systems can tolerate.

Let us be quite dear about what we are asserting and denying.
In one of the usual senses of "moral," when we talk about the
moral quality of a man or his actions, we refer to his motives. Now
some motives are higher and better than other motives; some
motives are narrow and purely self-regarding; others are wider
and have regard for otter people. But the social functions that
are essential to our way of life do not binge on any person's hav-
ing one sort of motivation rather than another. Care and diligence
in the maintenance of aircraft are essential to our transport sys-
tem; the motivations of aircraft mechanics axe not. Notice that it
makes perfect sense to ask a mechanic why lie chooses to work for
United Airlines. He may answer by reference to the pay, the
security, the absence of unwelcome supervision, and so on. But
it doesn't make much sense to ask him, ''What are your motives
for working here?"

We may ask him, quite meaningfully, if the occasion should
arise, "What was the motive behind your act of deliberate sabo-

310 : Education and Commitment

tage?" The difference between these two questions is, in part, that
working for United Airlines is a functional activity within a social
system. One's motives are largely irrelevant. Only when one
acts contrary to the accepted function of a position in a social
system does the question of motives become relevant. 4 The point
is just this the system as such does not demand any special mo*
tives in those who operate it. Insofar as "moral" has reference to
motives, our world, in its larger features, makes no moral demands
on individuals. This is the negative answer to the question: Are
there no demands of a distinctly moral character in the very
structure of our culture?
The positive answer has two parts:

1) AH cultures have rules that regulate the behavior of indi-
viduals; in our culture these rules must be universal and irre-
spective of persons as such. This is a distinctly moral demand
that arises from the nature of our world.

2) There are very high costs, including the cost of living under
impersonal rules, that are inherent in the very structure of our
world There is a distinctly moral demand that every individual
accept his share of the cost, however he may feel about having
to pay it

The first point is one we have made many times over. An indi-
vidual person has a distinct size, shape, color, sex, age, intelli-
gence, ability, religious affiliation, ethnic background, pattern of
hates, loves, visions and dreams. Some of the rules under which
he must live recognize some of these properties as relevant to the
demands made of him. But these rules do not treat him as a
unique individual; their demand is not to him as John Smith but
to anyone of a certain kind: he must register for military training
because he is a member of the class of males over eighteen years
in age.

Furthermore, an increasingly narrow range of properties is
relevant to the more important demands put on an individual.
Beyond a certain minimum point, years of age have relevance to
fewer and fewer of the rules to which one is subject. The same is
true of sex: at the moment the chief administrative position in

Moral Commitment and the Individual : 311

Western governments is barred to women, but this rule is in only
a few countries a matter of law, and in no country morally justi-
fiable. The same is true of race, religion, social status of parents,
etc. Those rules which still operate as vestiges from earlier cul-
tural patterns have no moral significance in our world. But is it
not moral that such distinctions have no relevance?

It is a bid odd, however, to speak of a moral demand when look-
ing at an individual person. Because of the rapid change inherent
in our dynamic culture, individuals frequently find themselves in
situations in which conflicting rules put conflicting demands on
their actions. We say that such a person faces a moral problem.
Yet the decision as to which rule ought to be followed is quite
frequently made purely by reference to the disciplines of thought
discussed earlier. Which of these rules actually fits with the
nature of the world in which we live? So put, the question is
purely intellectual; it is most usually answered by tracing the
natural history of the rules and examining their place in the system
in which the actor finds himself.

There are, of course, ultimate moral dilemmas that cannot be
solved by intellect, which is to say they cannot be solved at all.
These arise most frequently in philosophy classes, not in the
context of practical life. If life were for most people most of the
time merely a series of moral dilemmas, a viable social system
would be impossible. For the most part, what we call moral prob-
lems are situations in which the rules that we appeal to give
conflicting answers, but the decision as to which has more weight
is determined by appeal to the disciplines of intellect. It is for
this reason that it is a bit odd to speak of a situation like this
as posing a moral demand on the individual; the demand is simply
for clear thinking.

But how is one to follow the roles when they conflict with his
immediate desires? More generally, how is one to act in the way
demanded by the world? Is not this kind of action really central
to the kind of ordering that we speak of as commitment?

Surely yes. And when we shall have understood this answer,
we shall find it contains all that can be said about the other two

312 : Education and Commitment

questions. To explain how and why this is so, we must refer to
the final element in commitment: the symbol system by which the
individual and his relation to the external world may be under-
stood and interpreted.

Symbols drawn from traditional religions are no longer adequate
for the contemporary world. Their origin is in a cultural system
based on interpersonal and familial loyalty. Extended to include
the impersonal structures of our social and physical world, the
symbolic message of Christianity or Judaism becomes attenu-
ated, if not actually unintelligible. This judgment implies no
disrespect to the great achievements of twentieth-century theolo-
gians, particularly Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Jacques
Maritain. The depth of social sensitivity shown by these men and
the enormous ingenuity demonstrated in their efforts to express
contemporary social insights in the traditional language of Chris-
tianity are worthy of universal admiration. But those achieve-
ments in themselves actually help to establish our case: as they
stand, that is to say, as they are known and utilized in the
common sense world of metropolitan culture, the symbols of
the traditional religions are not adequate for understanding and
interpreting commitment in a context of impersonal structures.
It is no accident that church membership is conceived as an
affair of family and locality, that the executives of the electrical
companies convicted of corporate collusion were regarded as
excellent church members. The symbols of Christianity and
Judaism make sense, give adequate expression to the demands
for interpersonal commitment within the family and local
neighborhood. Within the larger structures of society and nature,
no.

In an almost diametrically opposite way, the symbols used to
explain and justify politico-economic systems fail to account for
commitment within the family and neighborhood. One is not a
member of the proletariat or the bourgeoisie in the context of his
own home. This was not always so. Self-consciousness about
social class or other ideologically expressed relation to the larger
structures of the society could be, in some historical moments has

Moral Commitment and the Individual : 313

been, the central symbolic expression of family and community
interaction. But this isn't true now. The symbols for interpreting
human behavior in families and neighborhoods are not trans-
latable into the political and economic terms by which we
ordinarily describe and justify the large-scale, impersonal, cor-
porate structures of contemporary culture. We have argued this
point before; we recall it here only to emphasize that the tradi-
tional religious, political, and economic symbol systems are inade-
quate to express commitment in contemporary culture.

And so we must ask again: What land of action is demanded by
the kind of world we live in? How is one to know what the world
demands? How is he to learn to act in accordance with his
knowledge?

The committed person knows what his world demands of him
and acts accordingly, because of his knowledge. We have already
shown that one can know these demands through the disciplines
of thought. Of these disciplines of thought, only the discipline of
natural history provides a symbolic medium through which an
individual can interpret the complex relations he sustains with his
world. And knowing oneself as a part of a social system is accept-
ing the moral demands inherent in that system.

Knowing oneself as worker, mother, voter, taxpayer, consumer,
and wife is to accept the moral demands arising from each of
these roles. Seeing the interconnections among the varied cor-
porate structures in which one's personal life is embedded and
knowing how all these are both connected with and also separated
from the interpersonal life of family and neighborhood are ways
of accepting the world and its demands on conduct.

To ask anything more from commitment is to erect symbol
systems into absolutes. Particularly, we should reinterpret what
it means to teach young citizens of this nation to love their
country* No barrier is imposed to prevent love of family, friends,
locality, religion, or even institution, nor does anything prevent
our projection of love from the minute part we can see to the
whole which we know only through symbols. To know it well is
to recognize that America is no longer the kind of place that

314 : Education and Commitment

easily admits of the sort of personal identification we could
call 'love of country." It is not only too large, too complex, too
impersonal an entity for anyone to love; it is also too implacable
in its demands. Our nation, beyond any that has ever existed,
offers freedom, order, and opportunity. And beyond any other,
our nation exacts a price for its goods. Our freedom from mate-
rial want, from poverty, drudgery, disease, and ignorance will
endure only so long as we pay the high price for these great
goods, the price of submission to the discipline of a technological
culture not to technology per se but to the forms of rational
thought and action and to the ordered relations with others in
the superstructures which channel and direct our energies.
This discipline exhibits itself not only in the time clocks at the
production end but also in the need to surround oneself with
innumerable physical objects, each of which demands care and
attention.

So also is there a cost we must pay for our freedom from arbi-
trary acts by persons in power. God, we are told, is no respecter
of persons, which leads us to believe that God is a bureaucrat.
Only in a society which places power in impersonal rules is there
a guarantee of freedom from arbitrary personal acts of injustice.
This does not deny that there is favoritism, inefficiency, and gross
neglect of duty, but these are corruptions of the ideal, and we
must be continually alert to eradicate the offenders, otherwise
the entire system will come crashing down around us. The price
is high, and we have been admonished quite enough by men
who would wish to exercise power over other men without ra-
tional, impersonal control. Commitment, we would suggest, is
the recognition and acceptance of the price we have to pay for
freedom from the whimsical, capricious, or malicious acts of
persons in power. But let us not be misunderstood on this point
either. We argued earlier that the size, complexity, and inter-
dependence of the great superstructures of the public world
do not preclude the presence of a great deal more freedom and
creativity than these organizations at present allow. Commit-
ment in this particular instance means that one seeks to expand

Moral Commitment and the Individual : 315

the areas of freedom and exhibit more personal initiative within
a system that remains fundamentally corporate in form. That a
certain price in external regulation and control has to be paid
does not mean that all freedom is lost. In fact the values that can
accrue from rationalized organization of our public life not
only the material values of mass production but also the ethical
values of restraining the power of man over man will not accrue
unless individuals constantly strive to extend the limits of free-
dom at all levels within the organization.

In short, part of the price of being an American is being an
organization man. Autonomy is not, as Whyte would have us
believe, a viable alternative. On the contrary, the very attempt
to discover an alternative is a form of mental and social illness,
a denial of reality. The important question is not whether, but
what kind of organization man? One who simply occupies a
niche on an organization chart? Or one who strives to extend the
bounds of his own freedom to act with initiative and resourceful-
ness at whatever level he finds himself? Truly to understand the
reality of the dynamic world we live in is to see that the second
sort of individual is not only preferable ethically but that with-
out him our emerging social structure will not stand. Note again
that the cognitive grasp of what our world demands furnishes the
ground for commitment

We could continue through the list of social goods and their
costs; for example, the omnipresence of the goal of self-fulfill-
ment does indeed broaden and extend the lives of millions of
individuals, but it makes any naive contentment in life impossible.
But we leave it to the reader to trace this duality in all our values.
We turn instead to the final question: Is there any ultimate pur-
pose in this social system?

Order and stability in the social and physical world are essen-
tial to personal integrity for the individual. From the simplest
expectation that one's footfall will find solidity to the most complex
predictive hypothesis in the physical sciences, one stakes his
whole integrity as a person on orderliness in the physical world.
One or two or even several misjudgments can be tolerated when,

316 : Education and Commitment

as is usually the case, reasons for the misjudgments can be
found. But if life presented a preponderance of wholly inex-
plicable failures of the physical world to accord with expecta-
tions, personality would disintegrate.

This need for orderliness in the physical world has exact
parallels in the social world. In our day-by-day encounters with
other human beings, our expectations are fulfilled: a smile from us
elicits a smile from others; a frown, a frown. Approaching a
stranger on the street we incline to the right, he does likewise, and
our bodies pass without grating contact Children learn to speak
the language of their parents; time and money spent in acquiring
the skills necessary for practicing a highly technical vocation
are returned with suitable interest during a lif etime of productive
work.

Although both nature and society violate our expectations
occasionally the unanticipated earthquake destroys the solidity
of the ground; a technological revolution renders hard-won skills
economically useless the more we know, the more our expecta-
tions include divergencies from simple uniformity. A sense of
self, then, becomes a more differentiated, complex phenomenon
as one's image of the natural and social world becomes more
complex. "I'm just a farmer'* means a different concept of self
in an age when agricultural technology has reached the level
it has with us as contrasted with what that statement meant in an
age when only the grossest expectations of natural processes
were part of the conceptual apparatus of title farmer. Just so, "I
am a teacher/* "I am a mother." One's concept of self is not
divorceable from the expectations one has of the world he
inhabits.

But the increasing accuracy of our knowledge and the conse-
quent complexity of the natural and social worlds do not assure
the integrated relation of a man and his world, the relation we are
calling commitment On the contrary, this very complexity creates
a deep fissure in the modern soul; a break between intellect and
esthetic sensitivity on one hand and the moral conscience on
the other. Intellectually and esthetically modern man delights

Mora! Commitment and the Individual s 317

in diversity and change, in the unusual, the unique. The disci-
pline of experiment has taught us to appreciate the obdurate fact
which disproves the neat generalization; we like our order com-
plex and richly textured, not monotonously simple. Modern
cosmological theories, the slowly emerging picture of the nucleus
of the atom, the story of evolution, the new history wherever
the light of research is allowed to shine, we see not chaos but
subtle and diverse patterns that replace the simple mechanical
notions that satisfied our ancestors.

A world like this, so delightful to the mind's eye, creates a
peculiar problem for the kind of moral conscience we have in-
herited. It is not that we have created insoluble moral dilem-
mas for ordinary citizens. For most of us, fortunately, in most
of our actions, the right thing to do is not only very obvious,
it is also the most natural, the easiest thing to do. As we pointed
out earlier, organized civil life would be impossible if truly
difficult moral problems were the common experience of ordinary
men. A decent society, such as ours is, separates right conduct
from wrong in such measure that it is far more likely that right
conduct will happen than wrong. This relates also to our point
about motives: they are irrelevant except when a person deliber-
ately, willfully violates codes of right conduct.

But our conception of morality has it not only that we should
act rightly but that we should do so for some higher reason, to
serve some higher purpose, to fulfill some final meaning in the
world. Ad maiorem gloriam Dei y for the sake of Duty itself,
for my Country, my Race, my Class, my Way of Life . . * through-
out the history of Western civilization different claimants to be
the supreme object of commitment have been heard. But now,
as Nietzsche saw, those who are self-consciously literate and
attentive to the world can no longer take any such claims seri-
ously* 5 We have created a world in which an individual can find
it easy and natural to behave decently toward his neighbors,
to practice the classical virtues of temperance, magnanimity, and
justice, even the Christian virtue of humility. The price we pay

318 : Education and Commitment

for such a world is that we give up the belief that there is a final
reason, an ultimate meaning to justify human existence.

Two questions immediately arise: Is it not true that life is
terribly flat, stale, ultimately unsupportable when deprived of
final meaning? And what about the unremitting conflict with
world communism and our social need, not merely for decent
and humane behavior, but for courage, dedication, and sacrifice
that go beyond what can be called conventional morality?

Neither of these questions is easily answered. Socrates* noble
dictum, "The unexamined life is not worth living," is obviously
an intellectualist's conceit (when said by anyone save that person
who chose to die rather than stop examining life aloud). But
modern men and women have no choice. The very conditions of
life the mobility, the highly symbolic quality of all human
action, the widespread literacy all increase the complexity of
the world and the corresponding sense of self in the individual.
Thus our life itself leads inevitably to its own examination. The
discouraging feature of the present situation is the lack of edu-
cation to engage in any fundamental examination of life. The
historical accident that kept religion out of the public schools
is only partly responsible for this. Neither is there evidence that
parochial school training in this country or teaching by the "agreed
syllabus" in English state schools does a measurably better job
than American secular, public schools in giving students the
capacity to examine their own existence in the drama of human
history. 8

Perhaps the final step in the democratic experiment is that the
society no longer poses an ultimate meaning to life. Instead it
builds within each individual such a complex sense of self that
the person is forced to create meaning, order, and purpose for
himself.

It may be that human beings are incapable of making this
experiment a success. Still, having embarked on it, we must not
falter simply because there is no guarantee of a favorable out-
come. We cannot remake the genetic constitution of the human
race, but we can attempt to build the theory and practice of a

Moral Commitment and the Individual : 319

new kind of education that, if achieved, would make ultimate
freedom possible.

But what sort of education would that be? Our answer is in
the four intellectual disciplines that we outlined earlier. We are
quite aware that there are aspects of personality that can be
reached only with great struggle, if at all, through purely cog-
nitive procedures. We know the frantic efforts that men make to
escape from freedom. We are not oblivious to the authoritarian
personality and the deeply destructive urges that go with it. 7
Original sin is no quibbling point in theology*

Still we must hold to the principle, even as Mr. Bestor formu-
lated it, that a democratic society is morally required to give its
finest, its fundamentally intellectual education to all its citizens.
Any citizen so educated may indeed find life flat, stale, ultimately
unbearable. The culture has few or no compelling myths, super-
stitions, or illusions to comfort him. But he may, on the other
hand, find the quest for meaning, the freedom to create his own
purposes, the most rewarding life of all. The disciplines of
thought and action that we described ever so briefly above we
regard as the best education for men and women who will
undertake to live a life of ultimate freedom.

But what about the survival of a democratic society? Now that
we are faced with the challenge of communism, a system
that asserts a monolithic purpose for all its members, a system
that is now pressing us with its full power throughout the world,
can we afford to set individuals loose to find their own meaning
in life? Does not the preservation of freedom require its limita-
tion at least during the critical years of the present world con-
flict?

Answers to these questions are not to be found by statistical
measures used according to the theory of games. 8 It is not a
matter of comparing the freedom we sacrifice for present security
against the freedom we might lose if the spread of communism
is not halted. This way of looking at the matter assumes what
we may call the "rat-race-and-withdrawaT theory of public life,
The answer to the demand for commitment and dedication is to

320 : Education and Commitment

replace this obnoxious theory of public life with something more
adequate.

The rat-race-and-withdrawal theory of public life is so much
a part of the climate of opinion among contemporary intellec-
tuals that its public expression cannot seem other than trite. 9
They proclaim that the public world, the world of great corporate
superstructures, is nothing but a rat race. The business corpora-
tions exist only to exist: mass advertising creates mass demand to
consume the products of mass production, and so around and
around forever, all to no purpose other than that the wheels in-
crease in number and speed. Governmental structure is necessary
to keep these business corporations from destroying one another
domestically and to help spread their influence throughout the
world before the (really quite similar) Russian corporate struc-
tures spread their influence throughout the world. The meaning-
lessness of the whole competition is nowhere better revealed than
in the growth of gigantic military systems which, to justify their
existence, wiU eventually blow the rat race to utter cosmic ob-
livion.

"Official" education, as received in school, through the mass
media, from pulpit and White House makes the rat race sound
terribly important; it makes responsibility and authority in the
corporate, public world seem exciting and worthy of attainment.
But the "informal" education among the cognoscenti teaches that
the only sensible style of life for man is to exploit that easily
exploitable system as efficiently as he can and to use his already
acquired leisure and comfort to build a private world in which to
pursue self-cultivation until the system blows itself to pieces.

It does not really matter on this theory that television fare is
generally inane, vulgar drivel, that urban redevelopment is creat-
ing habitation more fit for poultry than human beings, that the
natural beauty of our continent is being destroyed with all deliber-
ate speed, that the basic decisions affecting us as a nation are ever
further removed from popular inspection and control, that com-
pulsory education for a large proportion of our urban youth
is nothing more than custodial supervision, that some public

Moral Commitment and the Individual : 321

agencies, such as those responsible for transportation and mental
health, function at the lowest imaginable level of efficiency none
of these things matter very much since the whole corporate system
is a rat race, and anyway there's nothing an individual can do
about it. The system, moreover, does provide excellent oppor-
tunities for the individual to withdraw and seek his own self-
fulfillment through music, literature, arts and crafts that may be
pursued in the private world of the home and family. Here indeed,
is the way of wisdom, the cultivation of one's own garden, as
Voltaire so sagely advised.

And in the present world crisis, on the rat-race-and-withdrawal
theory, the society must make certain demands on the individual
in order that the system may be preserved. By a combination
of force and fraud, it exacts as large a proportion of the indi-
vidual's time and personality as it can; the individual resisting
as hard as he can. By a Mnd of balance of tensions, depending
on internal and external pressures on the system, a compromise
is achieved between individual freedom and social survival.

The rat-race-and-withdrawal theory does account for many facts
of public life the graft and corruption revealed daily in the
press and the cynicism with which these revelations are greeted,
the senselessly huge salaries paid to corporate presidents, signify-
ing the absence of any genuine social reward for socially useful
service, and so on. An individual can order his Me on the
premises of this theory^ but he does so at the cost of violating
the very realism and disillusionment he cherishes. For this con-
cept of isolated individualism is pure romanticism; self -fulfillment
is not to be found in withdrawal into a private world but in
productive work in the public world. It does not matter that the
public world is imperfect, that its hugeness swallows up the
small efforts of individual men and women, that the rapidity of
change means that every achievement is soon superseded. For
this public, corporate world, despite everything, is real. Here
there is reality to success and failure; whether the human race
survives or not depends on how we learn to work the institutional

322 : Education and Commitment

forms demanded by the density and consumption requirements of
homo sapiens on this planet.

We hold, therefore, that the key to eliciting excellence in the
manifold actions of Americans is not in some phony emotionalism,
the use of fraud to persuade individuals to give up their self-
enhancing actions in order to perform socially useful services.
Rather it is to be found in the intellectual discipline which
finally enables the individual to see both his private and public
worlds as his own. Distance, change, complexity, mobility
these ineluctable features of modern public life do make it look
like a gigantic rat race. The appeals we make to youth, trying
to enlist them in causes they do not understand, are transparent
to all but the hopelessly stupid. Psychic withdrawal often appears
to be the only alternative to madness.

But a firm intellectual grasp of the real nature of this system
with all its complexity, impermanence, dynamism, and free-
dom gives the individual a sense of being of, as well as in, his
society. That is commitment. Courage, creativity, and leadership
spring out of this ordering of an individual, his world, and the
symbols by which he understands both. The symbols are those
of the appropriate intellectual disciplines. 10

The obvious alternative is sure to fail. The only way in which
we could create a national purpose to match that of communism
is by destroying the very freedom we are supposed to serve.
We should have to institute strenuous controls over the flow of
information. We should have to devise all sorts of rewards and
punishments to support an orthodoxy. We should have to substi-
tute myth and superstition for the truth about our natural and
social worlds. There are those groups who, out of fear and
hostility, would be willing to do just that.

But aside from the moral abhorrence which the suggestion
arouses, the appeal to an ultimate meaning served by our na-
tional existence would not, in all likelihood, bring our youth to
any great pitch of enthusiasm. The young men and women who
volunteered to serve as teachers in East Africa and in the Peace
Corps made it quite clear that their motives were not those of

Moral Commitment and tne Individual : 323

furthering a particular economic and political system, but over-
whelmingly in promoting their own self -growth through the
experience of serving other people. They believed, rightly we
hope, that what they had to offer was superior to the Russians*
contribution because the Americans would be willing to teach,
build roads, and improve sanitation without insisting on any par-
ticularly American purpose these improvements were to serve.
Africans, Asians and South Americans should decide for them-
selves the ultimate values, if any, to be served by prolonging
human life, reducing drudgery, ignorance, and disease.

Perhaps in the long run, the society that agrees to tolerate
the tension between public and private worlds, that gives the
individual a chance to create his own meaning in both these
worlds, that provides him with the tools and symbols to under-
stand the richness and complexity of the world around him
without shallow myths and legends perhaps that is the society
that can evoke man's highest loyalties and deepest commitments.
American education, we believe, ought to be dedicated to that
possibility.

Notes and References

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION. EDUCATION AND THE PROBLEM OF COMMITMENT IN
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LIFE

1. Max Lerner, America as a Civilization (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1957)-

2. For further discussion and references, see chap. vii.

3. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1961), p. xiii.

4. Richard Pares, The Historian's Business and Other Essays (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p. ix.

5. David Riesman, "The Uncommitted Generation, 'Jmu* 01 Organi-
zation Men* in America/* Encounter, (November, 1960), pp. 25-30.

Chapter Two

EDUCATION AND THE TOANSFORMAHON OF AMERICA

1. The Great Debate is the title of a collection of some of the more
garish of recent comments on education to appear in the popular
press. The editors have made no effort to help the reader separate
truth from willful lie, of which there is more than a little present.
The collection is edited by C. Winfield Scott, Clyde M. Hill, and
Hobert W. Burns (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall Spectrum
Books, 1959).

2. Arthur Bestor, Educational Wastelands (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1953). The finger of accusation is pointed in chap, vii,
entitled "Interlocking Directorate of Professional Educationists/* For
the moral imperatives, compare chap, ii of Educational Wastelands,
"The Ideal of Disciplined Intelligence," with Bestows "Education and

326 : Notes and References

Its Proper Relationship to the Forces of American Society/' Daedalus
(Winter, 1959), pp. 75-90. In the latter, he no longer asserts that
the ideal of disciplined intelligence is inherent in American democracy,
as he had held earlier. By an application of what Riesman calls the
countercyclical policy, Bestor now maintains that the ideal of disci-
plined intelligence is of particular concern to the school just because
of its absence in the vaguely anti-intellectual American culture. See
David Riesman, Constraint and Variety in American Education (Gar-
den City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958), p. no,

3. Arthur Bestor, The Restoration of Learning (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1956), esp. chaps, xv, xxv. (Since this was written, Pro-
fessor Bestor has moved to the University of Washington.)

4. Compare Jacques Barzun, Of Human Freedom (Boston: Little
Brown, 1939), with the same author's House of Intellect (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1959). In the first book, Barzun sees that there
have been excesses in the habit of mind labeled "Progressive," but he
senses a self -corrective tendency already in operation. Twenty years
later he seems to regard the whole enterprise as hopeless.

5. Barzun, House of Intellect, p. 100.

6. Compare Aristotle's Politics, Book VIII, 13-17, and Plato's Re-
public, passim, especially 4410-445^ 535a-54ib, with John W.
Gardner, Excellence (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), chap. i.

7. Mr. Gardner is by no means unaware that there are fundamental
contradictions in American life; indeed the subtitle of Excellence
points directly to one of them: "Can We Be Equal and Excellent
Too?*' His arguments on this question deserve far more extensive
criticism than we can give them here. But may we suggest some
questions which his book raises. Aristotle not only classified virtues or
excellencies, he also ordered them hierarchically with pure contempla-
tion as the highest good of man. Does Dr. Gardner seriously believe
that he has successfully reconciled the Aristotelian basis of his ap-
proach with the American tradition of egalitarianism and exaltation
of the dignity of productive labor? Curiously the only explicit refer-
ence to Aristotle in Excellence (p. ist) has the Philosopher sounding
like a radical egalitarian, while Plato is not mentioned at all. This is
very strange. Is it not also appropriate to ask whether Dr. Gardner
really thought through his conception of leadership and authority as
being appropriate to the new technological era into which we are
moving? "Who is going to manage the society?" (Excellence, p. 81)
is merely a sugar-coated version of Plato's fatal question, "Who shall
rule the state?" (Cf. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
[London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952.], I, 120.) Has Dr. Gard-
ner fully satisfied himself on Popper's charge: "I do not hesitate to
say that Plato utterly corrupted and confused the theory and prac-
tice of education by linking it up with his theory of leadership. . . .
Plato's assumption that it should be the task of education (or more
precisely, of the educational institutions) to select the future leaders

Notes and References : 327

and to train them for leadership, is still largely taken for granted. By
broadening these institutions with a task that must go beyond the
scope of any institution, Plato is partly responsible for their de-
plorable state/* (Open Society, I, 127.) Popper's argument in defense
of this view should be compared with Dr. Gardner's chap, vii, en-
titled, "Education as a Sorting-Out Process.**

8. Martin Mayer, The Schools (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1961).

9. Mr. Conant has expressed a certain "distasteful weariness" with
attempts to "decide what we mean by the word 'education/ " (James
Bryant Conant, The Child, the Parent, and the State [Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1960], p. i.) This is not surprising, really,
for no one can listen to those debates very long without becoming
similarly fatigued. Furthermore, in all his educational writings, even
those going back into the middle of the 1930*5, Mr. Conant has
showed the same preference for attention to immediate problems
with the objective, readily available facts at hand- It is interesting
also that before becoming president of Harvard in 1933, Mr. Conant's
branch of science was organic chemistry, which was at that time, of
all the physical sciences, the least theoretical and most closely tied to
laboratory facts. This same antitheoretical bias is seen in his interpre-
tation of the nature of science: see J. B. Conant, Science and Common
Sense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), p. 24: "The dy-
namic view . . . regards science as an activity/* as opposed to the
static view of science as an "interconnected set of principles, laws,
and theories, together with a vast array of systematized information."
Needless to say, Mr. Conant prefers the dynamic view.

10. Perhaps stemming from his experiences as High Commissioner
and later Ambassador to the Federal German Republic, Mr. Conant
has come to view the Cold War as the determining factor in setting
educational policies in this country, even in regard to such matters
as local administration: *lf we reafly wish to improve secondary edu-
cation in the United States to meet the national needs in this period
of a global struggle, surely district reorganization is a matter of
urgency in almost every state in the Union.'* (The Child, the Parent,
and the State, p. 39.) It is dear throughout his American High School
Today (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), unquestionably the most in-
fluential publication in American education since World War II, that
if he were pressed to justify his proposals, his ultimate appeal would
be to the security of the nation in its global struggle. He has an al-
most mystical devotion to "this mixed-up, confused society of ours."
(The quotation is from his Citadel of Learning fNew Haven: Yale
University Press, 1956], p. 27.) He prefers, it would seem, that it re-
main that way.

11. Raymond P. Harris, American Education: Facts, Fancies, and
Folklore (New York: Random House, 1961). Harris is not at all hesi-
tant when it comes to answering big questions, p. 272: "The greatest

328 : Notes and References

need of the American public schools at the present time is financial
support/' Page 273: "The real crisis in American education is the
rneagerness of resources that forces the professionals in most public
schools to operate at levels of efficiency below those of which they
are capable/' Page 281: 'The real tasks of American education . . .
are those of matching learning experiences to the individual needs
and abilities of all pupils." Page 296: "Further improvement in public
education requires only public confidence and public support." The
absence of qualification in these statements leads one to wonder
whether Mr. Harris may not be whistling in the dark to conceal a
nagging suspicion that things may not be so clear after all.

12. Myron Lieberman's arguments are thus directly relevant to the
thesis of this book. See his The Future of Public Education (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 75: "Centralization and pro-
fessionalization are inevitable, not in spite of what people think but
because enough people will eventually think long enough and hard
enough about public education to realize that no other policy makes
sense." Given the human capacity for prolonged delusion, it is diffi-
cult to see just what "inevitable" means in that context. But the pre-
diction is undoubtedly correct. The schools will have to be brought
into the mainstream of American corporate organization, though as
we argue in chap, ix, they must also maintain a crucial distinctive-
ness. Sections of The Future of Public Education were published in
The Nation early in 1959, culminating with the very provocative
"Let Educators Plan Our Schools," March 7, 1959. Reaction to this
series spread far outside the pages of The Nation.

13. See Decade of Experiment, The Fund for the Advancement of
Education, 195* 1 (New York: The Fund, 1961). Compare Lieber-
man, op. cit. 3 chap. xii.

14. A brochure, published by the Institute, explains the process:
The American Institute of Biological Sciences, representing
84,000 biologists, established the Biological Sciences Curricu-
lum Study (BSCS) in January 1959 to seek the improvement of
biology education. A steering committee composed of outstand-
ing college biologists, high school teachers and other educators,
all interested in improving the quality of the teaching of biol-
ogy in the schools of America, was established under the chair-
manship of Dr. Bentley Glass of the Johns Hopkins University.
The BSCS, with headquarters on the campus of the University
of Colorado, has been financially supported primarily by grants
of over $2 million from the National Science Foundation.

In seeking to improve high school biology, the BSCS has
designed new materials for high school students. Preliminary
experimental editions of these materials were prepared by teams
of specially selected high school biology teachers and university
research biologists at a Summer Writing Conference in 1960.
During the 1960-61 school year, this preliminary experimental

Notes and References

edition of BSCS High School Biology was used by 14,000 stu-
dents in selected schools throughout the United States. In the
summer of 1961, a Second Summer Writing Conference again
made up of selected high school teachers and university research
biologists revised the materials based on the experience in the
schools and on reviews of the books by scientific and educational
societies and by individual biologists, educators, psychologists,
child development specialists, and other interested persons.

15. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1956). The utter condemnation with which he holds
the "power elite" is given full vent in his last chapter: "The men of
the higher circles are not representative men; their high position is
not a result of moral virtue; their fabulous success is not firmly con-
nected with meritorious ability. Those who sit in the seats of the
high and mighty are selected and formed by the means of power, the
sources of wealth, the mechanics of celebrity, which prevail in their
society. They are not men selected and formed by a civil service that
is linked with the world of knowledge and sensibility. They are not
men shaped by nationally responsible parties that debate openly and
clearly the issues this nation now so unintelligent^ confronts. They
are not men held in responsible check by a plurality of voluntary as-
sociations which connect debating publics with the pinnacles of de-
cision. Commanders of power unequaled in human history, they have
succeeded within the American system of organized irresponsibility"
(p. 361). (Mills' unexpected death on March 20, 1962 was a great
loss. It is hard to name another critic of American life who has his
depth and intensity.)

16. See John Kenneth Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Con-
cept of Countervailing Power (Boston: Hcraghton Mifflin, 1952).

17. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1958). Galbraith contends that we can eliminate
poverty by correcting the social imbalance between investment in
human resources and investment in material resources (p. 317). He
says that an increased allocation of funds to education will provide
the essential personnel for an increase in wealth (p. 272). In fact,
the effect of education "is to increase the range of wants to be satis-
fied and to lessen the dependence on those which must be contrived*'
(p. 280).

18. A. A. Berle, Jr., Power without Property (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1959), p. no: "So I hope these essays will be taken for what
they are: studies of one of the major forces (but not the only major
force) which is steadily and almost unintentionally transforming
American life and doing this with less agony, less noise, less waste
(yes, less waste in spite of a plethora of that) than seems to be the
case in the other twentieth-century revolutions currently proceeding
in most of the world"

19. Ibid., p. 22: "So, it seems, the ultimate protection of indi-

330 s Notes and References

viduals lies not in the play of economic forces in free markets, but
in a set of value judgments so widely accepted and deeply held in
the United States that pubHc opinion can energize political action
when needed to prevent power from violating these values." Page 135;
"In a democracy, this core of ideas, conceptions and desires is a
consensus of choices made by individuals who seek illumination, guid-
ance, perhaps leadership from men they trust, as to the life values
they hope to realize. But leadership toward and development of a con-
sensus of opinion on life values are not the product of the centers of
power and responsibility directing the economic machinery. They
come out of the universities and institutions of learning, the daily and
periodical press, the authors who write more formally in books. Oc-
casionally, the men who lead may take office in public life, or even
directorships in corporations; but their dedication is to humanity and
truth. They are our spiritual elite* Over the years an Albert Schweitzer
or a William James, a Eugene O'Neill, or a John Dewey has more
causative power than all the Lords Temporal of economic institu-
tions,"

no. David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney, The
Lonely Crowd (New York: Doubleday, 1953). One of Riesman's
critics claims his work is a denigration of the middle class and that his
view is basically pessimistic. He argues that the "autonomous" type
which Riesman proposes as a solution from the impasse of personal
conformity is by Riesman's own reasoning nearly impossible of realiza-
tion. See Robert Wheeler, "Mr. Riesman's Consumers," The American
Scholar, XXVI (Winter 1956-57) , 39-50.

M. William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York:
Doubleday, 1957) . The protest against conformity is in some measure
a condemnation of the restrictions placed upon the individual by
corporate organization. The ideology of the organization man is an-
alyzed by William M. Evan in "Organization Man and Due Process
of Law,' American Sociological Review, XXVI (August, 1961), 540-
547, who proposed two countervailing forces to overcome the delete-
rious effects of the structure of management in industrial organiza-
tions. He speculates that these effects extend to community and fam-
ily. "As a result of the premium put on cautious behavior calculated
not to offend the preferences and expectations of a superior, the
organization man may tend to transfer this behavior pattern and
principle of behavior to community life and engage in only 'conform-
ist* activity. ... A related effect or the ideology may be observable in
family values and child rearing patterns of the organization man. The
values of seeking approval from superiors, of 'teamwork' and of 'to-
getherness* may be transplanted from the corporation to the family"
(p. 544). Whyte had made much of the same point in his analysis
of suburbia. On p. 330 he wrote: "As far as social values are con-
cerned, suburbia is the ultimate expression of the interchangeability
so sought by organization. It is classless, or, at least, its people want

Notes and References : 331

it to be. As in the organization, so in the dormitories there has been a
great broadening of the middle, and a sort of 'declassification' of peo-
ple from the older criteria of family background."

22. Recently Riesman has been assuming much more of an activist
position. With others, he has initiated a twentieth-century "Com-
mittee of Correspondence" which had the great good fortune to draw
unfavorable criticism in the editorial pages of- Life. A recent sympa-
thetic treatment by Eric Larrabee, "Riesman and His Readers/* says
his objective was not to delimit but to free individuals (Harper's
Magazine [June, 1961], pp. 59-65).

23. See Riesman, Constraint and Variety in American Education
(Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Rooks, 1958).

24. This distinction between public and private is as profound as
any that may be proposed in the social sciences. Following quite
logically from her preoccupation with the growth of modem totalitar-
ianism, Hannah Arendt has investigated nistorical roots of the dis-
tinction (The Human Condition [Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1958], Part II). John Dewey made his new interpretation of
that distinction a central point in his social philosophy (The Public
and Its Problems [New York: Henry Holt, 1927], chap. i).

Richard Pipes argues that the attempt in the U.S.S.R. to eliminate
the distinction an attempt deeply rooted in Marxism itself leads to
the impossibility of genuine personal commitment ("The Public
Mood," Harper's Magazine [May, 1961], pp. 107-113).

An interesting thesis on the polarity of these two realms is given
by Sir Ernest Barker in his Principles of Social and Political Theory
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), Book VI.

25. The once prevalent "nature versus nurture" controversy now
appears as a false question in the argument over their relative im-
portance in learning and personality. It is now generally accepted that
both genetic and environmental factors operate in intricate linkages.
Anthropologists hold that if we accept the organic factors as given,
then personality and learning are both reflections of the sociocultural
environment. If this is so, then the study of the environment is a neces-
sary procedure for understanding the individual See John J. Honig-
mann, Culture and Personality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954) .
See also Solon T. Kimball, "An Anthropological View of Learning,"
The National Elementary Principal, XL (1961), 23-27. What promises
to be a significant advance in joining learning theory and educational
method is found in Jerome S. Bruner, The Process of Education (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1960) .

The several reports by Jean Piaget of his studies of the psychic de-
velopment of children provide us with the single most encompassing
set of data we have to answer regarding questions of how children
learn to categorize. See The CMas Conception of the World (New
York: Humanities Press, 1951); The Origins of Intelligence in Chil-
dren (New York: International Universities Press, 1952); The Lan-

332 : Notes and References

guage and Thought of the Child, 3d rev. ed. (New York: Humani-
ties Press, 1959).

2,6. The doctrine in education that you "teach the child, not sub-
jects" represents a type of slogan which supports the implicit as-
sumption of an individually atomistic world. Powerful influences from
psychology, psychoanalysis, and common-sense experience lend cre-
dence to the belief. Within an ideological climate of this type, it is not
difficult to ignore the importance of the social environment or to con-
sider it an evil without actually ever understanding what was being
condemned. See Evan, op. cit. This point of view is expressed by the
great anthropologist, Edward Sapir, whose cultural orientation and
bias for the individual caused him to write, "The major activities of
the individual must directly satisfy his own creative and emotional
impulses, must always be something more than means to an end. The
great cultural fallacy of industrialism, as developed up to the present
time, is that in harnessing machines to our uses, it has not known
how to avoid the harnessing of the majority of mankind to its ma-
chines. The telephone girl who lends her capacities, during the
greater part of the living day, to the manipulation of a technical rou-
tine that has an eventually high efficiency value, but that answers to
no spiritual needs of her own, is an appalling sacrifice to civilization.
As a solution of the problem of culture, she is a failure the more
dismal, the greater her natural endowment. As with the telephone
girl, so it is to be feared, with the great majority of us, slave-stokers
of fires that burn for demons we would destroy, were it not that they
appear in the guise of our benefactors" ("Culture, Genuine and Spuri-
ous/* in Culture,, Language and Personality [Berkeley, Calif.: Univer-
sity of California, 1956] ) . (This first appeared in the American Journal
of Sociology, Vol. XXIX [1924].) Our rejoinder: "Once the demons are
destroyed, what then?" Actually, Sapir lets his rhetoric run away
with him, for he later proposes to build a new culture for the in-
dividual. We have no disagreement with the objective, we only say it
cannot be done by focusing on the individual alone, as so many be-
lieve.

27. We were tempted to include here a complete history of the
idea of social system or social structure and to show how the idea
might be formulated so as to be defensible against the charges, some
of which are quite perceptive, that are frequently brought forward.
But this turns out to be quite another study altogether. In this book
we use both terms, "social system" and "social structure," in an un-
defined way, allowing the illustrations from agrarian, Irish, Navaho,
suburban, and other cultural units to carry the intent. We do not
allow biological or mechanical metaphors that might inhere in these
terms to creep into our analysis unobserved. We do not conceal po-
litical biases, revolutionary or reactionary, in our use of the terms.
We are aware, that is to say, of the pitfalls on the trail we take. We
hope to have avoided them. For those who want to follow the notions

Notes and References : 333

of social system and social structure, tie following citations are
recommended as starting points: (i) George P. Murdock, Social
Structure (New York: Macmillan, 1949). An empirical approach utiliz-
ing the cross-cultural survey materials of the Institute of Human Re-
lations, Yale University; (2) S. F. Nadel, The Theory of Social Struc-
ture (Glencoe, HI.: Free Press, 1957). An extraordinary combination
of sophistication in contemporary logic and theory, and extensive ex-
perience in anthropological field work gives Nadel a most illuminating
perspective on the theoretical developments he treats.

The two names one would think of first have most conveniently pro-
vided their own interpretation for the background of their work. See
Claude Levi Strauss, "Social Structure/' in A. L. Kroeber (ed.)> An-
thropology Today (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp.
524-553. His is the most rigorous formal model attack. See also Talcott
Parsons, "Culture and Social System," in Parsons, Shils, Naegele, and
Pitts (eds.), Theories of Society (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1961), II,
963-996.

28. In 1929, Alfred North Whitehead published The Ainu of Edu-
cation and Other Essays (New York: Macmillan). In its preface he
wrote, "The students are alive, and the purpose of education is to
stimulate and guide their self -development. It follows as a corollary
from this premise that the teachers also should be alive with living
thoughts. The whole hook is a protest against dead knowledge, that is
to say, against inert ideas." Mayer's description (op. tit.) of what hap-
pens in the classroom provides little evidence that Whiteheads ideas
have been put to practice, although most educators would heartily en-
dorse his objectives and we feel certain that thousands training for
teaching have had his essays as assigned reading. How does one explain
this failure? We believe that not until an organizational structure which
favors the educative process has been developed will it be possible to
introduce the kind of curriculum and methods Whitehead advocates.
We shall analyze this problem at length in chap. ix.

Chapter Three

AMERICA: THE PROMISED UUSOO

i. It is our intention in this chapter to present an overview of the
development and characteristics of American civilization. Obviously,
it is possible to touch upon only a few of the manifold aspects of such
a broad subject in this limited space. Those which we have chosen to
give emphasis to have been included either because they are espe-
cially relevant to later analysis or because they add illumination to
our particular orientation, or both. For those who through interest or
need desire to examine some full-scale interpretative studies of the
American scene there are several worthy of serious attention. In scope,

334 : Notes and References

originality, and scholarly competence we would rank Vernon L. Par-
rington, Main Currents of American Thought (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1927-30), among the best. Others include Ralph H. Gabriel,
The Course of American Democratic Thought, rev. ed. (New York:
Ronald Press, 1956); Henry Parkes, The American Experience (New
York: Vintage Books, 1959); and Charles and Mary Beard, The Rise
of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1936). A compre-
hensive analysis of the contemporary scene is found in Max Lerner's
America as a Civilization (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957).
For a popular treatment of the subject, see James Truslow Adams,
The American: The Making of a New Man (New York: Scribner's,
1944). A great classic, of course, is Alexis de Tocqueville, Democ-
racy in America (New York: Knopf, 1945).

Many writers express or report upon the belief and feeling, once
currently held, that America occupied a preeminent position in the
divine plan. Gabriel (op. cit. y p. 22) says: "Liberty, according to a
widely accepted version of American mythology of the early nine-
teenth century, had been established by Deity in an empty western
continent so that, freed from the burden of European tradition, it
might flourish and become an inspiration to the world," It is Gabriel's
contention that one of the three doctrines of the democratic faith was
that of the mission of America. Lerner (op. cit., p. 719) suggests that
preoccupation with God's design on the American continent "had its
origin in Puritan theocracy, and although watered down in subsequent
years, was never lost." He also writes (p. 28): "Some of the early
historians believed they saw the hand of God operating exclusively
in American history and did not trouble to inquire why He should
have shown so special a solicitude for this particular breed of chil-
dren. Not counting the inevitable drivel about the superior virtues of
Anglo-Saxonism, there were also a few accepted historians (Bancroft,
Fiske, Mahan, come to mind) who wrote of Americans as A Chosen
People in the Biblical sense of one through whose history some
Higher Power works out an inscrutable design for the whole human
race." The linkage of one's tribe or people with the supernatural, or
belief in the possession of special superior qualities, is a common
ethnocentric phenomenon. The Jews believe themselves to be the
jChosen People. Brazilians say, "God is a Brazilian." The Chinese cate-
gorized people into either barbarians or Chinese. However, wide-
spread belief that America occupies a special place in a divine plan
has now been lost. On those occasions when we ask our students if
they had been taught of a divine mission for this country, only rarely
does one admit that he believes in such a plan.

2. Parrington (op. cit. 9 I, iv-v) attributes the origin of these views
to French romantic theory as interpreted by Jefferson and others
views which found a congenial environment outside New England:
"Exploring the equalitarian premises of the doctrine of natural rights,
it amplified the emerging democratic theory by substituting for the

Notes and References : 335

human nature as potentially excellent and capable of indefinite de-
velopment. It asserted that the present evils of society are the conse-
quence of vicious institutions rather than of depraved human nature;
and that as free men and equals it is the right and duty of citizens to
recreate social and political institutions to the end that they shall
further social justice, encouraging the good in men rather than per-
verting them to evil. Romantic theory went further and provided a
new economics and a new sociology. . . . The political state, rightly
conceived, must be reckoned no other than a great public-service
corporation, with government as its responsible agent." (Italics ours.)

3. "So we stand on the brink of a new age: the age of an open
world and of a self capable of playing its part in that larger sphere.
An age of renewal when work and leisure and learning and love will
unite to produce a fresh form for every stage of Me, and a higher
trajectory for Me as a whole." Thus wrote Lewis Mumford in a poetic
and optimistic way about the future. The thesis in his The Trans-
formation of Man (London, Allen and Unwin, 1957) (p. 191 quoted),
is that we are entering upon a new stage in the history of humanity.

4. See V. Gordon Childe, What Happened in History (New York:
Penguin Books, 1946). Childe's systematic interpretation of the suc-
cessive stages in man's development has received near universal ac-
ceptance. The deliberate utilization of nature's laws in the domestica-
tion of plants and animals he describes as an economic and scientific
revolution. New interpretation, however, is beginning to challenge the
validity of his obvious reliance upon assumptions drawn from eco-
nomic determinism. Carleton S. Coon, The Story of Man (New York:
Knopf, 1955), is an authoritative and more comprehensive account of
man from an anthropologist's perspective.

5. See Parkes, op. cit., chaps, xi, xii, for a description of industrial
growth and its accompanying ideology. In Sigfned Giedion, Mech-
anization Takes Command (New York: Oxford University Press,
1948), technological change on a world basis is carefully traced.

6. Some measure of the skyrocketing sums spent by industry on re-
search and development is given by figures provided by the National
Science Foundation which show a jump from $3.6 billion in 1953 to
an estimated $11 billion for 1961 (National Science Foundation, Re-
views of Data on Research and Development, No. 30 [September,
1961]). By contrast, in 1940 the sums spent on research by all agen-
cies were less than one billion dollars.

7. The scope and development of contemporary social science may
be grasped by examining two volumes which range comprehensively
over the field: A. L. Kroeber (ed.), Anthropology Today (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1953), and Robert K. Merton, Leonard
Broom, and Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr. (eds.), Sociology Today (New
York: Basic Books, 1959).

8. H. G. Wells, The Outline of History (Garden City: Garden City,

19*5).

9. Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925).

336 : Notes and References

10. We have discovered no single satisfactory critique of the
agrarian world-view. Parrington's second volume (op. c&.), The Ro-
mantic Revolution in America, utilizes the literature of a recorded
view of the antagonists, but these do not reach to the basic levels of
agrarian inspiration, Parkes* analysis (op. cit) in his chapter entitled
"The Agrarian Mind'* draws almost entirely upon literature from New
England and is not acceptable. In Virgin Land by Henry Nash Smith,
he turns to literature of the Midwest for his analysis, but the resulting
picture is incomplete. Unfortunately, there is nothing for America's
heartland which approaches the depth of perceptive understanding
displayed by William Faulkner in his descriptions of northern Missis-
sippi life in Light in August or As I Lay Dying.

11. For a brief comment on the meaning of death in urban society,
see Lerner, op. tit., pp. 618-620. Contrast his analysis with the ac-
count of a funeral in a small Alabama town in Renwick C. Kennedy,
"Alas, Poor Yorick," The Alabama Historical Quarterly, II (1940),
405-415. See also James Agee, A Death in the Family (New York:
McDowell Obolensky, 1957).

12. See the following for analyses of age and sex functions; Mel-
ville J. Herskovits, The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples (New
York: Knopf, 1940), pp. 110-119; Ralph Linton, "Age and Sex Cate-
gories/* American Sociological Review, VII (1942), 589-603; James
West, Plainville, U.S. A. (New York: Columbia University Press,
1945)> PP- 107-111; Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three
Primitive Societies (New York: Morrow, 1935); and Margaret Mead,
Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World (New
York: Morrow, 1949).

13. It is a curious commentary on the orientation in our culture
which sees the sexual problem almost entirely as one which revolves
around the sufferings of the female sex. For example, Lerner devotes
thirteen pages to a section entitled 'The Ordeal of the American
Woman" (op. cit., pp. 599-611) . The ordeal of men, if any, is ignored.
The critical problems which men face are made quite explicit in
our chapter x.

14. See Solon T. Kimball, "Cultural Influences Shaping the Role
of the Child," Those First School Years (published by the Department
of Elementary School Principals), XL, (1960), 18-32.

15. For a concise anthropological analysis of the American nuclear
family, see Conrad M. Arensberg, "The Family and Other Cultures,"
in The Nation's Children (New York: Columbia University Press,
1960). Also see Ruth Anshen, The Family: Its Function and Destiny
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959).

16. Stephen Vincent Renet's unfinished epic poem, Western Star
(New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1943), begins with these lines:

Americans are always moving on.

It's an old Spanish custom gone astray,

Notes and References : 337

A sort of English fever, I believe,

Or just a mere desire to take French leave,

I couldn't say. I couldn't really say.

But, when the whistle blows, they go away.

Sometimes there never was a whistle blown,

But they don't care, for they can blow their own

Whistles of willow-stick and rabbit-bone,

Quail-catting through the rain

A dozen tunes but only one refrain,

We don't know where we're going, but we're on our way!

[From Western Star by Stephen Vincent Benet; Holt, Rine-

hart and Winston, Inc.; Copyright, 1943, by Rosemary Carr

BenetJ

17. See W. Lloyd Warner, American Life: Dream or Reality (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).

18. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago, Uni-
versity of Chicago Press), 1934.

19. Emile Durkheim, Suicide (Glencoe, III.: Free Press, 1951).

20. See Bertram ShadEner, "Animal Studies and Human Behavior,"
Human Organization, XV (1956), 11-14.

Chapter Four

THE IMMEDIATE PAST: MIDWEST AGRABIANISM
A3STD MAIN STBEET TOWNS

i. Although the emancipation of slaves and the preservation of the
Union are frequently cited as primary contributors to the Civil War,
we believe that this struggle was primarily a contest between two
antithetical agrarian systems. Consider, for example, that hostilities
had begun on the Kansas frontier several years previous to secession,
and that the first draft of a constitution for that state by Free Soil
adherents prohibited the residence of Negroes, free or slave (Alice
Nichols, Bleeding Kansas [New York: Oxford University Press, 1954!,
p. 47). Other evidence is also available. In chap, xiv of Virgin Land:
The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Vintage Books,
1957; first published by Harvard University Press, 1950), Henry
Nash Smith describes the new agrarianism arising west of the Ap-
palachians after 1830 as based on a new technology, surpluses, trie
need for free access to markets, geography, and the myth of a Prom-
ised Land in the Garden of the World. He writes (p. 179) : ". . . But
by the 1830*8 a new calculus and new symbols were required to in-
terpret the new West that was being created by forces wholly foreign
to the agrarian assumptions. . . . These changes spelled the end of the

338 : Notes and References

simple economy which in the first stages of settlement had corre-
sponded at least approximately to the agrarian ideal. In the long run
the virtuous yeoman could no more stand his ground against the de-
veloping capitalism of merchant, banker, and manufacturer in the
Northwest than he could against the plantation system in the South-
west."

Additional interpretative support for this thesis can be found in
Henry Bamford Parkes, The American Experience (New York: Vin-
tage Books, 1959), chap, x, "The Civil War/* One relevant comment
on the consequences of the War follows (p. 233) : "Meanwhile North-
ern industrial and financial interests had taken advantage of the
Secession of the South to establish a firm hold over the Federal Con-
gress. Although Northern businessmen had not caused the war, their
aggrandizement was certainly the most conspicuous of its results. . . .
By attempting to leave the Union in order to maintain Negro slavery,
the South had brought about the final and irreparable defeat of
agrarianism." (Italics ours.)

2. Frederick J. Turner, The Frontier in American History (New
York: Henry Holt, 1920). Turner first advanced his theory in a paper
first presented in Chicago in 1893. (Vernon L. Parrington [Main Cur-
rents in American Thought (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927-30),
p. 159! notes that Edwin Laurence Godkin, in "Aristocratic Opinions
of Democracy," North American Review [January, 1865], presented
substantially the same theory.) Currently, there is a reexamination of
the validity of Turner's thesis. Future evaluation will probably assign
greater importance to the democratic forces in urban centers man has
been customary. In Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt (New York:
Knopf, 1955), he assembles data which show the rich and varied in-
tellectual and cultural Me of the colonial cities and their undoubted
influence upon the back country.

3. See James Truslow Adams, The American (New York: Scribner's,

1944).

4. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism
(New York: Henry Holt, 1929); and The Kingdom of God in Amer-
ica (Chicago: Willett, Clark, 1937).

5. See Parrington, op. cit., Ill (The Beginnings of Critical Realism
in America), 259-282 ("The Plight of the Farmer"). ". , . While
capitalism had been perfecting its machinery of exploitation, he [the
fanner] had remained indifferent to the fact that he himself was the
fattest goose that capitalism was to pluck. He had helped indeed to
provide the rope for Txis own hanging. He had voted away the public
domain to railways that were now fleecing him; he took pride in the
county-seat towns that lived off his earnings; he sent city lawyers to
represent him in legislatures and in Congress; he read middle-class
newspapers and listened to bankers and politicians, and cast his votes
for the policy of Whiggery that could have no other outcome than his
own despoiling. . . , Clearly, it was high time for the deflated farmer

Notes and References : 339

to get into politics on his own account if he were to save himself from
beggary, and so during the Gilded Age began a great agrarian revolt
against capitalism that was to turmoil the next quarter of a century
a revolt that was to mark the last effective organization of the
farmers to combat the new order, the last flare-up of an old fashioned
agrarian America before it was submerged by the Middle Class" (p.
262).

6. Smith, op. tit., p. 138.

7. Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (New York: Mac-
millan, 1923). The numerous writings of Hamlin Garland provide a
rich source for those who seek to understand pioneer Me on the Mid-
dle Border. He ruthlessly stripped away the romantic illusions to re-
veal the stark reality which settlers on the prairies faced. Parrington
calls Garland's Main-Travelled Roads and Prairie Folks a landmark,
"for they were the first authentic expression and protest of an agrarian
America then being submerged by an industrial revolution" (op. tit.,
Ill, 294). "The figures of bitter men and despondent women fill his
pages and darken the colors of his realism. It is the cost of it all that
depresses him the toll exacted of human happiness" (III, 392).

8. One of the infrequently reported aspects of rural life was the
traveling milliner or "cat-wagon" with her caravan of girls who made
hats for the women and gave sexual comfort to the men.

9. Harriet Connor Brown, Grandmother Brown's Hundred Years,
1827-1927, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929). This original account of
pioneer life was recorded through the interest of one of Grandmother
Brown's daughters-in-law. It is rich in the detail of daily living and of
aspirations of those times.

10. Garland, A Son of the Middle Border, p. 20.

11. Ibid., p. 50.

12. Brown, op. tit., p. 167.

13. The ultimate resignation to divine Providence was far from uni-
versal. Each locality possessed a goodly proportion of those who did
not attend religious services, although they might read the Bible
regularly. A few were outright hostile and there was always a scatter-
ing of atheists. Even the godly were sorely put to retain their faith
under conditions of stress. One illuminating example of this Job-like
attitude is given by Ise in his description of a conversation between
his mother and the visiting preacher. She protests the lack of rain
which causes humans and animals to suffer and denies that trust in
God is a solution because He obviously hasn't done His share. Nor
does she accept divine punishment as an explanation, for she doesn't
believe that tie Lord would want children without shoes or cattle
without feed (John Ise, Sod and Stubble: The Story of a Kansas
Homestead [New York: Wilson-Erickson, 1936], pp. 246-251).

14. Garland, A Son of the Middle Border, chap. xxxv.

15. Adams, op. tit., pp. 329-330.

16. Southern womanhood has been extolled and damned but few

340 : Notes and References

have stated a part of the reality more movingly than Stephen Vincent
Benet in his epic poem, John Browns Body (New York: Farrar and
Rinehart, 1941), pp. 155-156:

The velvet sheathing the steel demurely

In the trained, light grip that holds so surely.

* *

She was often mistaken, not often blind,

And she knew the whole duty of womankind,

To take the burden and have the power

And seem like the well-protected flower.

To manage a dozen industries

With a casual gesture in scraps of ease,

To hate the sin and to love the sinner

And to see that the gentlemen got their dinner

Ready and plenty and piping-hot

Whether you wanted to eat or not.

This was the creed that her mother taught her
And the creed that she taught to every daughter.

[From John Brown's Body; Holt, Rinehart And Winston,
Inc.; Copyright 1927, 1928 by Stephen Vincent Benet;
Copyright renewed 1955, 1956 by Rosemary Carr Benet.]

In considerable contrast is the description given us of a Yankee
school teacher who came to teach in a north Alabama town of the
antebellum South (Joseph G. Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama
and Mississippi [New York: Sagamore Press, 1957; first published
^Ssl). An extract from Baldwin's uncomplimentary description fol-
lows (p. 213) : "Miss Charity was one of those 'strong-minded women
of New England' who exchange all the tenderness of the feminine for
an impotent attempt to attain the efficiency of the masculine nature;
one of that fussy, obtrusive, meddling class, who, in trying to double-
sex themselves, unsex themselves, losing all that is lovable in woman,
and getting most of what is odious in man."

Neither New England nor the South gave us the image of an
idealized woman for the agrarian period. It arose on the Middle
Border.

17. Hamlin Garland varies the theme in "A Branch Road," pub-
lished in his collection of stories, Main-Travelled Roads (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1909). A young farm youth, feeling the guilt
of having deserted his love, returns to find her married and a worn-
out drudge at thirty. He urges her to flee with him and promises to
give her the tender love that will restore her health and beauty.

18. Every person who has an interest in education should read Jesse

Notes and References : 341

Stuart, The Thread That Runs So True (New York: Scribners, 1949).
It is an account which describes one man's attempt to improve edu-
cation in a remote Kentucky county and the adversities of parental in-
difference or hostility, poverty, and politics which he had to meet.

19. Brown, op. cit. 9 p. 214: "One morning it was the fifth of May,
1888 he went away. He was just a little past eighteen years old
my last baby. I stood at the door to watch him go down the street. I
cannot tell you how I felt. It was a lovely spring morning, but I felt
as if the end of the world had come. No children in my home any
more! The last one going from me. Oh, oh, oh! And yet I would not
have held him back!"

20. Garland, A Son of the Middle Border, p. 239.

21. The assumption of residential stability among families of
countryside and small town is hardly supported by the facts. When
the country was being settled there was a constant flux due to the
arrival of new families and departure of those who failed or sought
greener pastures. Lewis E. Atherton, in Main Street on the Middle
Border (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1954), de-
scribed families similar to the Garlands as follows (p. 17): "They
were literally wanderers in the Middle Border, a part of it only in the
same ephemeral sense that multitudes of others belonged to the new
states being created." He continues (p. 17) : "Even those who re-
mained in one locality felt the pressure of the constant stream of
transients that flowed around them. Small towns acquired their old
families rapidly people who had lived there for a whole generation!
And even they were affected by the technological revolution which
constantly battered and reshaped their community. Like the Garlands,
they saw their children choose careers differing from their own, thus
lessening the sense of stability and continuity which all societies
crave."

22. Although Robert Ingersoll is barely remembered today, in the
last quarter of the nineteenth century he was a controversial figure
who advocated atheism and preached a religion of humanity. For a
brief sketch of his career, see Ralph H. Gabriel, The Course of Amer-
ican Democratic Thought, rev. ed. (New York: Ronald Press, 1956),
pp. 189-194.

23. E. W. Howe, The Story of a Country Town (New York: Boni,
1926); Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1920); Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology (New York: Mac-
millan, 1928); Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (New York:
Huebsch, 1919).

24. For an excellent anthropological description of a midwestern
village and rural life, see James West, Plainville, U.S. A. (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1945). Although this report is based upon
materials gathered just previous to the Second World War, the style
of life described has changed little in three-quarters of a century or
more.

342 : Notes and References

25. Ise, op. cit., p. 305. In Sod and Stubble, the affairs of the town
constantly intrude into Ise's account of farm life The local creamery
or lumber yard is viewed as a profiteering monopoly. Townspeople in-
troduce new leisure-time pursuits such as croquet and crokinole. Bi-
cycles appear. Squabbles over politics and booze attract attention. The
young people meet and make new friends.

26. Atherton, op. cit. See chap, ix, 'The City Comes to Main
Street."

27. Ibid., p. 75: "Lastly, every community had a group of inhabi-
tants who simply ignored the middle-class code of respectability and
religious observance. They drank and fought and caroused and
'cussed/ or they hunted on Sunday, shunned the churches, and pur-
sued their simple pleasures without yielding to community pressure
to lead a "better* life. Here, then, was the cultural pattern a dominant
middle-class Protestant group given to religion and stern morality; an
upper-class group of 'respectable' people who failed to see any neces-
sary connection between pleasure and sin; Catholics; foreigners; and
a lower' class, which ignored the dominant code except perhaps for
temporary allegiance following revival meetings. In spite of latent an-
tagonisms, villagers lived close together and could not avoid influ-
encing one another. It was a rare boy indeed who grew to manhood
solely as the product of one cultural layer."

28. Solon T. Kimball and Marion Pearsall, The Talladega Story,
(University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1954), pp. xxiii-xxxii.

29. Joseph Stanley Pennell, in The History of Rome Hanks and
Kindred Matters (New York: Scribner's, 1944 ), attempts to inter-
connect the traumatic experience of Civil War days with the flat
civilian Me of veterans in a Kansas town. Although the past lies
heavy on the lives of these men it has little meaning in the ongoing
minutiae of daily living. For the third-generation descendant, living
in metropolis, the past has become utterly senseless. The vignettes of
small-town life are accurate.

30. Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams (New York: Grosset and Dun-
lap, 1921), and The Magnificent Ambersons (New York: Grossett
andDunlap, 1918).

31. Sinclair Lewis, op. cit.; Babbitt (New York: Grosset, 1922).

32. John Marquand, The Point of No Return (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1949); Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1940).

33. This section, "Social Class and the Town-Community," was
originally published by Solon T. Kimball in Sociologia (Sao Paulo,
Brazil), XXI (May, 1959), 186-202, under the title "Classe Social e
Comunid&de nos Estados Unidos." Minor editorial changes have been
made from the original text.

Notes and References : 343

Chapter Five

PROGBESSIVE EDUCATION: THE TRANSITION FROM
AGRARIAN TO INDUSTRIAL AMERICA

1. Certainly no note of impending reversal is to be found in the
Essays for John Dewey s Birthday edited by K. D. Benne and William
O. Stanley (Urbana: University of Illinois, Bureau of Research,
1950). The essays by Horace S. Fries and Foster McMurray are basic-
ally critical in tone, but both assume that criticism means reformulat-
ing and extending the Deweyan tradition; they also assume that the
problems Dewey worked on Le., problems concerned with the
nature of scientific method and social planning are the problems that
ought to be attacked. Ten years later, these assumptions would not
have been made.

2. Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School (New
York; Knopf, 1961), p. 89: "Finally, and perhaps most important, the
progressives were fundamentally moderates, and for all their sense of
outrage, moderates take time. . , . The real radicals of the nineties
men like Eugene Victor Debs and Daniel DeLeon had little
patience for reform through education: they directed their energy to
the drive for political power which they saw as the only real source
for genuine social alleviation. But for the much larger group, impelled
by conscience yet restrained by conservatism, education provided a
field par excellence for reform activities untainted by radicalism.'*
This book is the first and will likely be long regarded as the definitive
history of progressive education. But notice in this instance Cremin
tends to look for revolutionary tendencies in the ideological and po-
litical sphere, while our emphasis is on the dynamic forces found in
technology and changing social relations. A full understanding, of
course, would have to combine both these emphases.

3. Bertrand Russell, "Dewey's New Logic," in P. A. Schilpp (ed.),
The Philosophy of John Dewey (Evanston, 111.: Library of Living
Philosophers, 1939), p. 137: "Dr. Dewey has an outlook which, where
it is distinctive, is in harmony with the age of industrialism and collec-
tive enterprise." This is Russell at his worst; at his best, of course, he
stands with the immortals.

4. There is, admittedly, no historical justification for thus narrow-
ing the meaning of the term "progressive." Cremin (op. eft) has
demonstrated the range of ideas and the heterogeneity of persons
caught up, centrally or peripherally, in the overall movement known
by that name. Indeed, John Dewey and his fellow pragmatists in
education were not the first to voice and act on many of the ideas
that have come to be associated with their names. (See Herbert W.
Schneider, A History of American Philosophy [New York: Columbia
University Press, 1946].) But they did provide three key elements
without which the public and professional discussions of education

344 : Notes and References

would have been far different from what they in fact were during the
period we are considering. First, they provided for the in-group, the
fellow believers, a fundamental set of doctrines around which con-
troversy could and did flourish. (See John L. Childs, American
Pragmatism and Education [New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston,
1956].) Second, they set the problems and issues on which debate
could be joined between pragmatists and their manifold enemies.
(See John S. Brabacher, Modern Philosophies of Education., ad ed.
[New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950].) Third, the pragmatists, particu-
larly John Dewey, had an almost clairvoyant insight into the social
relevance of educational issues, and with this insight they kept edu-
cational discussions tied to major debates of public policy. As early
as 1899, Dewey formulated the problem of schools in an urban, in-
dustrial society wherein "concentration of industry and division of
labor have practically eliminated household and neighborhood occu-
pations at least for educational purposes. But [he continues,] it is
useless to bemoan the departure of the good old days. ... It is radical
conditions which have changed, and only an equally radical change
in education suffices. We must recognize our compensations the
increase in tolerance, in breadth of social judgment . . . [etc.]. Yet
there is a real problem: how shall we retain these advantages, and
yet introduce into school something representing the other side of
life . . . ?" (The School and Society [Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1900], pp. 25-26). The evolution of Dewey's educational
thought should be interpreted as a deepening sense of what was
good about the good old days, how radical was the change in condi-
tions, why the compensations have their own unique value, and where
one might seek theoretical bases for an education that would suffice.
Seen in this way, Dewey's last major statement on education (Expe-
rience and Education [New York: Macmillan, 1955; copyright 1938])
has an easily intelligible continuity with his earlier writings. See also
Martin S. Dworkin, "Editor's Introduction" to Dewey on Education
(New York: Columbia University, Teachers College, 1960).

5. Marie Sandoz: Old Jules (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935). This is
an effective social and political allegory as well as an engrossing novel.

6. The discussion in this section is focused on the midwestern
agrarian system, especially as it came to dominate all American agri-
culture after 1861. (See discussion and reference in Chap, iv.)

7. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Brad-
ley (New York: Vintage Books, 1954), Vol. I, Chap. xvii.

8. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York: Harper
and Brothers, 1944), pp. 887-893.

9. R. Freeman Butts and Lawrence A. Cremin, A History of Edu-
cation in American Culture (New York: Henry Holt, 1953), pp.
379-384.

10. For examples of die exceptions, see Elsie R. Clapp, Community
Schools in Action (New York: Viking Press, 1939). For the ideology

Notes and References : 345

of the community school expressed as program, see Edward G. Olsen,
School and Community (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945); also Lloyd
Allen Cook and Elaine Forsyth Cook, A Sociological Approach to
Education (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), especially Part IV.

11. This is said without prejudice to Cremin's study (op. cit.)
which is notably chary of evaluations. But we simply cannot say what
was the meaning of certain events and ideas until we see their out-
come, and that is still in doubt. The emergence, for example, of a
distinct profession (with specialized training and all the appurte-
nances) of educational administration and the bureaucratization of the
schools was not unrelated to the growth of progressive thought. But
we cannot tell exactly what that relation meant until we see what
happens to the concentration of power that has accumulated around
administrative positions. Compare V. T. Thayer, "The School: Its
Task and Its Administration/* in William H. Kilpatrick (ed.), The
Educational Frontier (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1933), chap,
vii, with the same author's discussion of administration in The Role of
the School in American Society (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1960),
especially pp. 270-273, 309-311. In the former work, Thayer seemed
to recognize the reality of a power struggle in which both the form
of administration and the concept of schooling were at issue. In the
latter, he has lost that idea altogether and talks about issues in ad-
ministration in terms of public relations and theories of learning. For
samples of the passions that this matter arouses and the spadework
in research that will have to be done before our understanding can
be clarified on this topic, see Charles Robert Kelly, Toward an Inter-
pretation of the New Movement of 1915 in Educational Administra-
tion (unpublished Ed.D. project, Teachers College, Columbia Uni-
versity, 1961).

12. A national, as opposed to a regional, vision was certainly char-
acteristic of Horace Mann. Even as Mann speaks as secretary to the
Board of Education of Massachusetts, he uses the term "Common-
wealth" more as synonymous with "Republic" than as referring solely
to Massachusetts. See The Republic and the School, ed. Lawrence A.
Cremin (New York: Columbia University, Teachers College, 1957).

13. William F. Ogburn, Social Change (New York: Viking Press,
1932) pp. 201-202: **. . . industry and education are correlated parts
of culture, hence a change in industry makes adjustments necessary
through changes in the educational system. Industry and education
are two variables, and if the change in industry occurs first and the
adjustment through education follows, industry may be referred to
as the independent variable, and education as the dependent vari-
able." It is easy to see that the progressives accepted at least a varia-
tion of Ogburn's thesis of cultural lag. But the variation is itself
significant. Because education changes less immediately and automat-
ically in response to changes in the material culture (in Ogburn's terms
it is less adaptive than industry taken as a social organization), it also

346 ; Notes and References

follows that in educational change there is a chance for intelligent
planning to operate. While the progressives often complained of the
slowness of educational change, they would not have preferred a
purely mechanical connection such that every change in technology
produced an immediate and corresponding change in the schools.

14. This point is argued technically in James E. McClellan,
"Dewey and the Concept of Method," The School Review (Summer,
1959), PP- 213-228.

15. The first essay in John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin and
Other Essays in Contemporary Thought (New York: Henry Holt,

1910).

16. William H. Kilpatrick, "A Reconstructed Theory of the Educa-
tive Process/* Teachers College Record, XXXII (March, 1931); re-
vised and published as a separate pamphlet (January, 1935). "In
the history of civilization there emerge from time to time epoch-
making reconstructions of world outlook. . . . When these shifts of
fundamental conception arise, the effects reach far both in scope and
depth. No region of thought or endeavor can escape. . . . Education,
which properly represents both the growing and the conserving as-
pects of the individual and social process, becomes then involved in
the very essence of the reconstruction. If intelligence is to play its
proper part in this process, education must itself be remade so that
it can respond adequately to the new demands thus laid upon it."
Whatever may have been the actual effect of the progressives in
changing behavior in schools, in theory they were willing to see un-
limited change there in order that certain values would survive in
the larger social order.

17. Here, as throughout this chapter, we are presenting our own
interpretation, which is certainly not the only one available. While
we see the absence of final, ultimate, and eternal values as related to
a background of radically Protestant theology, others have seen it
differently, perhaps as deriving from the new cosmology of Peirce and
Whitehead in which not even physical laws were seen as permanent
but merely as transient phases of a changing universe. (See Max
Fisch, Classic American Philosophers [New York: Appleton-Century-
Crofts, 1951], p. 23.) And it is certainly true that the progressives
read and referred to scientific literature more than they did to
theology. (See Kilpatrick, op. cit.) But if one follows Dewey's con-
voluted arguments against trie existence of final values (in the usual
sense), in his Theory of Valuation (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1939), pp. 40-50, one must surely see that it is not a mere
corollary to a cosmological view. Dewey's argument, in fact, has much
in common with James Luther Adams' summary of Paul Tillich's
attack on idolatry: "If language is to express vividly our sense of being
grasped by something unconditional, it must use symbols drawn
from the actual world of subject-object correlation. Yet the use of
'objective' symbols brings with it the danger of objectifying God. It

Notes and References : 347

also gives rise to the Tialf-blasphemous and mythological concept of
the existence of God/ To draw the divine down into the world of
objects is to commit idolatry. This idolatry before an objectively
'existing* God is the ever present danger of all religion" ("Tillich's
Concept of the Protestant Era," in Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948], p. 301). Tillich is
trying to have that which is not limited by context clearly marked
off from that which is so limited. Dewey is concerned that symbols
properly referring to a context not be treated as if they were super-
contextual in meaning. The convergence is striking.

18. John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1934). The statement must be understood correctly. Dewey
did not fall into the idolatrous doctrine that the most cooperative and
egalitarian community is worthy of worship. According to Dewey,
nothing is worthy of worship. See Edward L. Schaub, "Dewey's
Interpretation of Religion," in Schilpp (ed.), op. tit.

19. Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf,
1941), pp. 80-85.

20. See R. Freeman Butts, The American Tradition in Religion and
Education (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), especially "Summary of
Historical Considerations," pp. 209-212.

21. See Cremin, op. cit., pp. 58-75, 363-65.

22. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Viking
Press, 1961), p. 178: ". . . that complex of educational theories . . .
under the banner of progressive education ... in America about
twenty-five years ago completely overthrew, as though from one day
to the next, all traditions and aU the established methods of teaching
and learning." Miss Arendt, a few pages before, had claimed ignor-
ance of matters educational. We believe her.

23. See: Kelly, op. cit. 9 passim; Cremin, op. cit., chap. iv. It is in-
structive to notice how little the pedagogical changes in rather con-
sciously experimental schools were directly related to progressivist
beliefs. See W. M. Aikin, The Story of the Eight-Year Study (New
York, Harper & Brothers, 1942). Another source is the series of
community studies in which schools were investigated along with
churches, families, local governments, and class structure. These
studies, some made during the height of the popularity of progressive
ideology, fail to show any significant effect on the schools themselves.
The classic is Robert S. Lynd and Helen M. Lynd, Middletown, A
Study in Contemporary American Culture (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1929). Other studies of a somewhat similar nature are sum-
marized and evaluated in Maurice R. Stein, The Eclipse of Com-
munity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960).

24. The deep moral sense of the progressives must never be for-
gotten. A non-pragmatist, Philip H. Phenix, writes: "But pragmatists
tend to swallow up values in process: they are ... determined to
banish fixed traditional codes of value and . . . absorbed with the

348 : Notes and References

methods of reconstructing them" (Education and the Common Good
[New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961], p. 12). A pragmatist, George
S. Counts, writes; ". . . democracy rests on basic morality. It can
thrive only if elementary standards of decency and humanity in all
public relations and in the conduct of all public affairs are observed
. . . men must be guided by the canons of simple honesty, truthfulness,
and intellectual integrity, in the exercise of power they must be just,
humane, and merciful [etc.]" (Education and American Civilization
[New York: Columbia University, Teachers College, 1952-], p. 283).
Just how much more traditional would Mr. Phenix prefer that a code
of values should become? What moral values does he see banished
in John L. Childs, Education and Morals (New York: Appleton-
Century-Crofts, 1950)? Mr. Phenix is undoubtedly correct when he
says (ibid.} that for the progressives, "the transcendent ground and
goal of the moral enterprise are obscured, if not explicitly denied/'
But this does not mean that traditional moral codes are being banished
or even reconstructed in any fundamental sense; what it does mean
is that the moral enterprise assumes that we know elemental right
and wrong without having to be told, and without any particular
"ground and goal" having to be supplied. Inquiry and intelligence,
ie., the process and methods of which the progressives made so
much, are required when we have to move from elemental right and
wrong to the complex rights and wrongs of a social order in radical
change. It is difficult to see how this claim could be denied.

25. The case is here somewhat overstated, perhaps, but in essen-
tials, we believe it is true. Note the word fundamental and its recur-
rence. It would be easy to document that the overwhelming propor-
tion of literature on educational method is in no sense "fundamental."
Let us consider only philosophies of education that at least pretend
to some status other than that of a cookbook. Check carefully through
Theodore Brameld, Toward a Reconstructed Philosophy of Educa-
tion (New York: Dryden Press, 1956), and you will find a quite sys-
tematic (and wrongheaded) social diagnosis as well as carefully
elaborated proposals for curriculum organization. But one will not find
the slightest indication that Professor Brameld knows or cares what is
being done in the "reconstruction" of various teaching fields or how
in practice these disciplines relate to the Utopian goals he thinks
should be set for our society. Possibly in reaction against this way of
doing philosophy of education, examples of which are quite numer-
ous, Philip H. Phenix, in his Philosophy of Education (New York:
Henry Holt, 1958), treats extensively and wisely of the various fields
of study to be found in the school. But professor Phenix, self-con-
sciously outside of the pragmatic-progressive stream, does not even
attempt to show how these fields of knowledge relate to the social
setting in which schooling occurs. Practically any well-known book in
philosophy of education will show one or the other of these obvious
nae. For a list of other references, see Frederick C. Gruber,

Notes and References : 349

Foundations for a Philosophy of Education (New York: Thomas Y.
Crowell, 1961) pp. 37-38. Because of their lack of concern with edu-
cational technology, among other reasons, philosophers of education
have been virtually by-passed in the extraordinary reconstruction of
schools currently underway. (See chap, ii) The influence of the pro-
gressives cannot be entirely negligible in this.

26. See B. Paul Komisar and James E. McClellan, "The Logic of
Slogans," in R. S. Ennis and B. O. Smith (eds.), Language and Con-
cepts in Education (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1961), pp. 195-214.

27. Washington: The Commission, 1961.

28. John Dewey, Philosophy and Civilization (New York: Minton
Balch, 1931); Liberalism and Social Action (New York: G. Putnam,
3-935 ) Both of these (despite the brevity of the latter) belong in the
canon of Dewey's serious writing. They show not only what political
doctrines he espouses, but also his firm belief that a philosopher is in-
extricably involved in politics, whether he will or no.

29. Theodore Brameld, Philosophies of Education in Cultural
Perspective (New York: Dryden Press, 1955), especially Part II, en-
titled "Progressivism, Education as Cultural Transition/*

30. As we mentioned earlier in connection with Dewey's conserva-
tism and his Common Faith there is for him a supremacy in the
shared. But nowhere is this made clearer than in his powerful, often
acidly critical, essays delivered as the Larwil Lectures and published
as The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt, 1927). After
expressing his hostility toward much of industrial capitalism, he con-
cludes by saying (p. 219), "We lie, as Emerson said, in the lap of
an immense intelligence. But that intelligence is dormant and its
communications are broken, inarticulate, and faint until it possesses
the local community as its medium."

31. Ibid., pp. 107-109.

Chapter Six

METROPOLIS IN TIME AND SPACE

i. The classic study demonstrating the correspondence between
community and culture is contained in Lewis Mumford's The Culture
of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938). Chapter IV, "Rise and
Fall of Megalopolis" and Chapter VII, "Social Basis of the New
Urban Order," are particularly relevant for our purposes. Two of his
more recent works are, The Transformation of Man (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1956) and The City in History: Its Origins, Its
Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt Brace,
1961).

See also Conrad M. Arensberg, "American Communities," Ameri-

350 : Notes and References

can Anthropologist, Vol. 57, No. 6 [1955], pp. 1143-1162. Arensberg
examines a number of variant types of American communities and
their associated cultural forms. He writes of metropolis (p. 1159):
"Within the huge metropolitan space, the new super-city is struggling
to take the form of a great wheel of internal traffic arteries and
peripheral belts. This is the great decentralized city of the automotive
age, and no planning can reverse its evolution, just as no plans
which belie its form, from traffic roads to slum clearance, can do
more than delay or impede its taking its characteristic shape."

2,. The Census Bureau has established a Standard Metropolitan
Statistical Area consisting of any area containing a city exceeding
50,000 persons including inhabitants of adjacent areas.

3. The sources for population statistics include, "The Census of
1960," Scientific American, Vol. 205 [1961], pp. 39-45, by Philip M.
Hauser; The New York Times, August 16, 1961; and "U. S. Census
of Population, 1960 Final Report/* PC (i) iB, Washington, D.C.

4. "The City as a Way of Life," and "The City Beautiful," two
chapters describing city transformation between 1880-1910 in Ameri-
can Skyline (New York: Mentor Books, 1956), by Christopher Tun-
nard and Henry H. Reed, Jr., are very helpful for recapturing the
effects of economic forces and life style during this period.

5. Max Lerner, America as a Civilization (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1957), says a new type of American character has devel-
oped within the frame of the city. In writing of the conditions which
were responsible, he said (p. 168): "What this means is that city
living has carried men and women ever further away from their in-
stinctual endowment. The city is not the root of the planlessness, the
tensions, and the conformism of American life, but it is the envelope
that encloses them. Or, to change the figure, the city is the battle-
ground of the values of the culture." His section, "City Lights and
Shadows," (pp. 155-172) graphically depicts the sense and smell
of the city. See also The Exploding Metropolis (Garden City: Double-
day, 1958), by The Editors of Fortune.

6. See "The Growth of a City: An Introduction to a Research
Project," in The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925),
pp. 47-62, by Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D.
McKenzie. Ecological studies of other cities have demonstrated that
the "hub" pattern is not universally applicable in all its details, but
for its day the conceptualizing of the variations in urban patterning
was a great advance. An interesting variant is described by Harlan
W. Gilmore in "The Old New Orleans and The New: A Case for
Ecology," American Sociological Review, Vol. 9, No. 4 [1944], pp.

7. See Russell Lynes, A Surfeit of Honey (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1957). In an original and entertaining essay on the new
cultural alignments of metropolitan culture, Lynes claims (p. 15) that
the social divisions of America should be viewed as a series of vertical
pyramids. "Instead of broad upper, middle, and lower classes that cut

Notes and References : 351

across the society of the nation like the clear, but uneven slices on a
geological model, we now have a series of almost free-standing
pyramids, each with its several levels and each one topped by an
aristocracy of its own/* For example, those engaged in business, en-
tertainment, matters of intellect, the underworld, labor, politics, and
sports are grouped in such pyramids. These are joined at the top by
a class of Upper Bohemians, free spirits recruited from the separate
pyramids, who communicate with each other and set the style for the
whole. See also The Tastemakers. (New York: Harpers, 1954).

8. A comprehensive demographic analysis of metropolis is con-
tained within Metropolis and Region (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins,
1960), by Otis D. Duncan, et al

9. See Eshref Shevky and Marilyn Williams, The Social Areas of
Los Angeles: Analysis and Typology (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia, 1949) This is a technical study of factors of social standing,
degree of urbanization and segregation (actually homogeneity) based
upon the 1940 U. S. Census.

10. The analysis of suburbia has been reserved for those chapters
in which we describe and dissect the nuclear family. The literature
about suburban life, sociological, descriptive, and fictional, is ac-
cumulating with some rapidity. One of the best and first studies was
Crestwood Heights (op. cit.). A more recent study by Robert C.
Wood, Suburbia: Its People and Their Politics (Boston: Houghton-
Mifflin, 1959), is far more sympathetic than some others. He does
grant, however, that irrationalities exist. For example (p. 19) : "There
is no economic reason for its existence and there is no technological
basis for its support. There is only the stubborn conviction of
the majority of suburbanites that it ought to exist, even though it
plays havoc with both the life and government of our urban age."
Our rejoinder would be that sometimes people know better than
theorists what is best. In fact, the salvation of the city may well lie
in a radical decentralization of its services which are now controlled
through huge bureaucracies. In this sense, the central city represents
the anachronism.

11. Cameron Hawley, Executive Suite (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,

195*)-

12. Nelson Algren will be best remembered for his The Man with
the Golden Arm, but The Neon Wilderness portrays the brutal and
hopeless lives of the urban flotsam.

13. Paddy Chayefsky, Television Plays (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1955). Chayefsky explains that in "Marty" and "The
Mother" he had presented literal reality with a psychological orienta-
tion. Without intending it he has also described the social reality
which fashions the psychic characteristics of his characters.

14. William F. Whyte, Street Corner Society (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1955). A sociological analysis of corner-boys in an
Italian neighborhood in Boston.

15. Arensberg, "American Communities" (op. cit), p. 1159: "The

352 : Notes and References

old graduated concentric zones of the industrial city are fast disap-
pearing. The mosaic that takes their place is a crazy-quilt of discon-
tinuities, where the fault-line between toney garden suburb and
Levittown or nch Button Place and squalid Dead End is abrupt,
sudden, and hostile, sometimes even policed with a guard or marked
by a ten-foot fence. It is no wonder that the persons who grow up in
such juxtapositions see nothing of the community pattern as a whole,
no longer have intimate connection with and reference toward
ordered groups a little 'better' or a little 'worse' than themselves, but
turn inward instead to the welter of their peer-group segregation/'

16. The question may legitimately be asked whether metropolis
actually represents a type of commimity as Conrad M. Arensberg has
defined the term. He writes (p. 248) : "Communities seem to be basic
units of organization and transmission within a society and its culture.
The definition is suggested both by their repetitive character and
by their characteristics of personnel, form, and function." Subse-
quently he adds (p. 249): "Now what distinguishes communities
from other human associations based upon territoriality and land use
is precisely their repetitive character and their wholeness and in-
clusiveness. They are like units not so much only as collections of
culture traits or social institutions repeated again and again, but first
of all as population aggregates." Arensberg would say that metropolis
fits the definition. See "The Community as Object and as Sample,"
American Anthropologist, Vol. 63, No. 2, [1961], pp. 241-64, by
Conrad M. Arensberg.

17. This section, "Social Differentiation and Metropolitan Culture"
and the introductory paragraphs at the beginning of the chapter
were originally published in Sociologia, op. cit. Minor editorial changes
have been made in the original text.

Chapter Seven

VALUING IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICA:
A FAMILY CENTERED PERSPECTIVE

1. This chapter, then, and the one which follows may be read
somewhat in the fashion that one looks at an optical illusion in which
figure and ground can, at will, be interchanged. To the economic de-
terminist who insists that the modern nuclear family is a product of
the growth of corporate organization, one can always reply that the
same evidence may be read in the other way, that the modern cor-
porate system is the outcome of the extension of the nuclear family.
Both are equally half-truths.

2. For a treatment of "values" as expressing fixed and irrevocable
moral judgments, see Philip H. Phenix, Education and the Common
Good (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961). Professor Phenix as-

Notes and References : 353

serts, for example, that "if marriages are to be permanent and pro-
ductive of humane values, marriage partners need to select one
another not on the basis of romantic attraction and immediate sexual
satisfaction, but out of regard for the long-term potentialities in the
relationship for the creation of a worth-full shared life." This is not
what we mean by "values."

3. John Dewey, "Theory of Valuation/' International Encyclopedia
of Unified Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939),
Vol. II, No. 4, p. 6: "As far, then, as the terminology of the present
discussion is concerned, the word Valuation' will be used, both
verbally and as a noun, as the most neutral in its theoretical implica-
tions, leaving it to further discussion to determine its connection with
prizing, appraising, enjoying, etc."

4. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics: "Let us resume our inquiry
and state . . . what is the highest of all goods achievable by action.
Verbally there is very general agreement; for both the general run of
men and people of superior refinement say that it is happiness."

5. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1946), pp. 290-296. There would seem to be no
way to translate "happiness" into Japanese so that the word could
stand for the highest of all goods achievable by action. It would take
a major cultural change to make that idea have any meaning in Japan.

6. William I. Thomas, "The Four Wishes and the Definition of the
Situation," reprinted in Talcott Parsons, Edward Shils, Kaspar D.
Naegele, and Jesse R. Pitts (eds.), Theories of Society (Glencoe, 111.:
Free Press, 1961), II, 741-744. (Taken from The Unadjusted Girl, in
Contributions of W. L Thomas to Theory and Social Research [New
York: Social Science Research Council, 1951].) It should be noted
that Thomas himself did not hold a naive view of "four wishes" some-
how acting like a beefed-up company of fates, pushing people this
way and that. "The significant point about the wishes ... is that they
are the motor element, the starting point of activity" (p. 743). More
recent theorists would rather work with a generalized concept of
drive or need than with the specified wishes given by Thomas. Cf.
Edward C. Tolman, "A Psychological Model/' in Talcott Parsons and
Edward Shils (eds.), Toward a General Theory of Action (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 279-360.

7. The allusion is to Ralph Linton's classic and pioneering study
showing the relation between changes in technology and in customs
among the Tanala of western Madagascar: The Study of Man (New
York: D. Appleton Century, 1936), chap. xx.

8. Dewey gave the image explicit statement in How We Think
(Boston: D. C. Heath, 1933), pp. 13-14. In William James the image
is rather diffuse, as much a characteristic of the man as a parable in
his writing. See his Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), I,
23 ; also his Pragmatism (London: Longmans Green, 1908), p. 203.
If one is to apprehend the full force of the change from the model of

354 : Notes and References

choosing proposed by Dewey and James, one should contrast their
paradigms with those being given by contemporary economists. For
example, Kenneth Boulding describes the contrast this way (The
Image [Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1961], pp. 84-85) :
"We suppose his [economic man's] mind to be like a department
store, full of images of commodities, each with a convenient price tag
attached. ... As the searchlight of his consciousness contemplates
five pounds of cheese and a dozen grapefruit it must also reveal
whether this conbination is better or worse than four pounds of cheese
and a dozen and a half grapefruit. [With this information, together
with all the other utilities and probabilities of all other possible com-
binations of goods,] economic man, clever fellow that he is, now
maximizes the expected values of his choices, a feat of mathematical
agility which it would take centuries of experience and enormous
electronic calculators to perfect." It is clear that economic man is
no longer even a plausible fiction; it is equally clear that Dewey and
James implicitly held a vision of economic man in their picture of
the pedestrian at the fork in the road. For a more detailed analysis of
the consequences of the breakdown of this pragmatic model, see
Herbert A. Simon, "A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice," Quar-
terly Review of Economics, LXIX (February, 1955), 99-118.

9. Stories are taken from William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization
Man (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), chap. xxii. It
is probably the human poignancy in Whyte's description of Park
Forest that makes the rest of his thesis carry a conviction that it does
not merit.

10. Ernest W. Burgess and Harvey J. Locke, The Family From
Institution to Companionship (New York: American Book, 1945).
The subtitle is misleading; the thesis of the book is actually the more
sensible idea that as an institution the family is founded today more
on interpersonal and less on contractual bases than it used to be.

11. The high divorce rate of America might lead some to conclude
that marriage among us is merely another temporary attachment in
a life of movement While there may be very limited subcultures, e.g.,
Hollywood, where this is true, it is not generally true of even the most
urban marriage. See William J. Goode, After Divorce (Glencoe, 111.:
Free Press, 1956), p. 18: "In most cases of divorce, the two spouses
do undergo a rather powerful experience. Whether it is the legal
action of divorce which has the greatest emotional effect, or the prior
experience of long conflict, misunderstandings, bitterness, boredom,
embarrassment, or guilt, the total experience is a difficult one for most
individuals. ... It is indeed a rare case in which both parties, with no
guilt or bitterness, separate and divorce in a cool fashion, with no
regrets." Goode's study further supports our analysis as he shows that
the more a family lives the typical metropolitan-suburban life that we
describe, the less frequently divorce occurs (op. cit., chap. v). There
is another point on which Goode's analysis corresponds to ours;
namely, that the American dating pattern, with its emphasis on inter-

Notes and References : 355

personal attraction, is functionally related to the whole social system,
including the family. For Goode's very suggestive hypotheses for fur-
ther research, see his article "The Sociology of the Family/* in R. K.
Merton, Leonard Broom, and L. S. Cottrell, Jr. (eds.), Sociology
Today (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1959), pp. 178-196.

12. John R. Seeley, R. Alexander Sim, and E. W. Loosley, Crest-
wood Heights (New York: Basic Books, 1956), p. 57.

13. Burgess and Locke, op. cit., chap. ii.

14. This is a profound social change. In a brilliantly penetrating
article written in 1942, Talcott Parsons said many of the things that
still need to be said about the American family pattern and its rela-
tion to the world of occupations ("Age and Sex in the Social Structure
of the United States/' reprinted in Clyde Kluckhohn, Henry A. Mur-
ray, and David M. Schneider (eds.), Personality in "Nature., Society,
and Culture [New York: Knopf, 1956], pp. 363-375). But even
Parsons did not anticipate the functional significance of adolescent
love attachments, dismissing them (p. 373) as "unrealistic roman-
ticisms." In light of his perspicacity elsewhere, it seems most plaus-
ible to conclude not that Parsons was wrong, but that a genuine
change has occurred since 1942.

15. Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-] ew: An Essay in American
Religious Sociology (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1960), pp. 57-64.

16. See Max Lerner, America as a Civilization (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1957), chap, xi and an exhaustive bibliography, pp.
991-996. Curiously, Lerner does not mention the very important essay
that provides fundamental concepts for understanding the arts as
elements of a culture: Meyer Schapiro, "Style," in A. L. Kroeber
(ed.), Anthropology Today (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1952), pp. 287-312. See also the wise and humorous treatment of
the popular arts by Reuel Denney, The Astonished Muse (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press), 1957.

17. This was just the point, of course, that divided the world into
two camps during the bitter Pasternak controversy. The Soviet side,
insisting that a judgment on a work of art is ultimately a social and
political judgment, is given very intelligently in the letter to Boris
Pasternak from the Editorial Board of Novi Mir, reprinted in Edward
Crankshaw's Khrushchev's Russia (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1959),

PP- 153-174.

18. Some interesting details and a cross-section of opinions about
this phenomenon are contained in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in
America, ed. David Manning White and Bernard Rosenberg (Glen-
coe, III.: Free Press, 1957). The essays in Parts II and VIII are
particularly relevant.

19. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street: The Story of Carol Kennicott
(New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1921).

20. Russell Lynes, "Upper Bohemians/' Harper's, (February,

1953), PP- 46-52.

21. Leo Rosten ["Leonard Q. Ross"], The Education of Hyman

356 : Notes and References

Kaplan (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937). The importance of con-
tinuity and cumulativeness in American symbols has been noted by
many commentators; it is a central point in Henry Bramford Parkes,
The American Experiences (New York: Knopf, 1947).

22. A typically "high morals" kind of language is found throughout
Robert E. Mason, Educational Ideals in American Society (Boston:
Allyn and Bacon, 1960).

23. A powerful expression of the private world of metropolitan
culture is to be found in the brilliant collection called Stories from the
New Yorker: 1950-1960 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960).
These stories, almost without exception, deal in a realm of human
relationships entirely divorced from the public, corporate world
the world of work, production, and politics. "Divorced from" means
just this: one could not imagine anything that happened in these
stories as having any recognizable consequences in the public world,
nor could one imagine that any problem arising in these stories could
be affected significantly by anything that occurs in the public world.
There is a constantly sensed exception, of course: nuclear warfare
could destroy the whole setting. This is no indictment; this is how
things are. The other side of the coin is less beautiful; there is an ir-
ritating vacuity in the literature of the public world since it so seldom
seems to have anything to do with the way people actually live. This
point is made with typically condescending tolerance by Max Lerner,
op. cit. y pp. 356-360. Whatever evaluation one puts on the actualities
of American public life, no one is likely to claim that "political phi-
losophy" is a major art among Americans today, as it so obviously was
before 1800, See Harold Laski, The American Democracy (New
York: Viking Press, 1948), p. 396.

Chapter Eight

SCIENCE AND SELF-FCILFILLMENT

1. The idea of national character and national consciousness can-
not be kept out of the discussion. See Margaret Mead, "National
Character," in A. L. Kroeber, (ed.) ? Anthropology Today (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1953).

2. Archibald MacLeish, J.B. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). A
play in verse.

3. The charge that Americans are materialistic in some distinctive
sense is one that has been made and scotched time and time again
ever since there was a person who could be called American. See
Harold J. Laski, The American Democracy (New York: Viking Press,
1948) , p. 725: "The view that America is more materialistic than other
peoples is a myth that is not even edifying/* The matter keeps coming
up for two reasons: the troublesome imprecision of the term "material-

Notes and References : 357

ist," and the extraordinary material success of Americans. The word,
"materialist" may mean, just to mention the most obvious difference,
either a philosophical doctrine concerning the nature of ultimate
reality, or an attitude toward life and values. There need be no cor-
relation between the two. The ancient philosophical materialists, in-
cluding the Stoics and Atomists, held that the world was ultimately
made of material stuff, but they utterly despised the pursuit of
material goods beyond those necessary for the maintenance of life.
Likewise, some men who have been most successful in gaining ma-
terial goods and power have, like Cecil Rhodes, espoused the most
idealistic metaphysics. Now, in a technical-philosophical sense of the
term, America has never been a land of materialism; the two phil-
osophical doctrines that can be called distinctly American transcen-
ientalism and pragmatism are both varieties of idealism, i.e., the
belief that mental processes are partly, if not wholly, constitutive of
the ultimately Real.

If we rid ourselves of the superstition that Americans are the most
shifted race of men in the field of material ingenuity, and if we recog-
nize the obvious truth that greed has no national boundaries, then
little is left of the notion that Americans are materialists in attitude.
The little truth that is left is this: Americans have put a very heavy
(and successful) emphasis on gaining control over the physical world
in order that later on they or their progeny could be occupied with
something else. And, of course, this emphasis can become a more
permanent preoccupation. But Robin Williams (American Society
[New York: Knopf, 1951], p. 409) may have overstated the case for
attitudinal materialism: "Once a high standard of living has been
sn joyed ... it is extremely difficult to reduce the level of sensation.
\s new wants emerge and are satisfied over a period of time, they
become expected, accepted, ^normal,* and in this process they, at the
same time, come to be felt as rights to which one has a moral claim."
Williams' point is that this tendency is universal in human beings, that
Americans, merely because their standard of living has risen so high,
appear inordinately concerned with material sensation. But in the ten
pears since Williams wrote, there is some reason to believe that
simplicity in objects, refinement in sensation, dignity and elegance in
taste are gaining ground even in Detroit. Articles in Harpers
Magazine and advertisements in the New "Yorker are accurate, even
perversely sensitive, barometers of the changing climate. See also
David Potter, People of Plenty Economic Abundance and the Amer-
ican Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959)-

4. See Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American
Thought (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927-30), III (1860-1920,
The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America}, 74-75: <e . , . With
its Calvinistic antecedents Scotch-Irish and Huguenot as well as
New England Puritan America had always been unfriendly to a
pagan evaluation of man's duties and destiny, and the revolutionary

358 : Notes and References

movement of the forties had been kept within sober ethical bounds.
John Humphrey Noyes was probably the most radical American of
the times, yet the Perfectionism of his earlier years, with its ascetic
religiosity, bore little resemblance to the later communism of the
Oneida Community. But the liberalism of the fifties was casting off all
Hebraic restraints and running wild^ proclaiming a new heaven about
to appear on the free continent of America, and bidding the youth of
the land live joyously as children of the earth. Paganism for the
first time lifted up its head and surveyed the American scene a
youthful paganism, lusty and vigorous, that suggested amazing ap-
plications of the respectable doctrines of freedom and individuality, to
the scandal of older fashioned folk. Too long had a God of wrath dis-
possessed a God of love. Life is good in the measure that it is lived
fully, and to live fully Is to live in the flesh as well as the spirit. . . .
As the current of emotionalism gathered force, a frank joie de vivre
submerged the old reticences; candor, frankness, a very lust of self-
expression, was the new law for free men and women a glorification
of the physical that put to rout the traditional Hebraisms."

5. Silas LaphamTs career shows this clearly (William Dean
Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham [Boston: Tichnor, 1885]). See
the perceptive comments by H. S Commager, The American Mind
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), pp. 57-60.

6. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Dover
Books, 1949), chap. i.

7. See R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa, Games and Decisions
(New York: John Wiley, 1957), chap. i.

8. There is a large literature dealing with this momentous decision,
but none of it contradicts Truman's statement on the actual persons
composing the two or three committees which insisted on the direct,
military use of the bomb. See Harry S. Truman, Memoirs (Garden
City: Doubleday, 1955), Vol. I, chap. xxvi. The list of persons con-
cerned, excluding the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is given on p. 419. Cf.
C. P. Snow, The New Men (New York: Scribner's, 1955).

9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London:
Routiedge and Kegan Paul, 1922), #7: "Whereof one cannot speak,
thereof one must be silent." The Tractatus is the outstanding state-
ment of scientific positivism.

10. See M. J. Aschner, 'The Language of Teaching/* in B. O.
Smith and R. H. Ennis (eds.), Language and Concepts in Education
(Chicago: Rand McNally, 1961), pp. 112-126.

11. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Hough-
ton Mifflin, 1958).

12. On the general topic of social organization for work, see chap.
ix. On the specific points in this paragraph: (i) The ideology of
work as an aspect of self-fulfillment: see William H. Whyte, Jr., The
Organization Man (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957),
Parts II and III. (2) Relation of productivity and satisfaction on

Notes and References : 359

job: the literature on this is immense and still growing. A good start-
ing place is Mason Haire, "Industrial Social Psychology ,** in Gardner
Lindzey (ed.) Handbook of Social Psychology (Cambridge: Addison-
Wesley Press, 1954). (3) On the problem of exploitation of individuals
by large-scale organizations (and, inevitably, vice versa): see Daniel
Bell, Work and Its Discontents (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956), and
Seymour Lipset, M. Trow, and J. S. Coleman, Union Democracy
(Glencoe, 131.: Free Press, 1956).

13. An entertaining collection of essays and articles describing play
in America is found in Eric Larrabee and Rolf Meyersohn (eds.),
Mass Leisure (Glencoe, III.: Free Press, 1958).

14. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto,
Sec. II.

15. The allusions are two recently fashionable sermons by psychol-
ogists: Gardner Murphy, Human Potentialities (New York: Basic
Books, 1958), and Gordon Airport, Becoming (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1955). More powerful in its impact however, than
either of these is a collection of essays toward the same theme, Clark
E. Monstakas, The Self,, Explorations in Personal Growth (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1956).

16. C. Northcote Parkinson. Parkinson's Law and Other Studies in
Administration (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).

17. Natalie Rogoff, "Social Stratification in France and the United
States," in Reinhard Bendix and Seymour Lipset (eds.), Class, Status,
and Power (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1953).

18. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1956); N. S. Khrushchev, Speeches in America (New York:
Crosscurrents Press, 1960), pp. 125-140, meeting with United States
trade union leaders, San Francisco, September 20, 1959. The agree-
ment on this point, however, does not imply any overall similarity.
Mills was not a Communist; he wasn't even a Marxist, for he lacked
(unfortunately) the Marxist's sensitivity to social system.

19. One could multiply documentation ad nauseam on this point.
It would be difficult however, to find a stronger statement than that
made by John W. Gardner, (Excellence [New York: Harper & Broth-
ers, 1961], p. 141): "If we believe what we profess concerning the
worth of the individual, then the idea of seK-fulfillment within a
framework of moral purpose must become our deepest concern, our
national preoccupation, our passion, our obsession." Gardner is quite
right, self -fulfillment must become our symbol for the supreme value,
not because of what we profess but because of how we live. It is
fitting, perhaps, that what was once seen as a possibility has now be-
come a necessity. Compare Gardner's statement with Laskfs (op. tit.,
p. 403) : "America is different. It is opportunity, it is promise, it is
experiment . . . there is no reason to put up the barriers against that
ache for self-fulfillment which the Old World dare not satisfy lest, in
so doing, it disturb the pattern of social relations upon which the sta-

360 : Notes and References

bility of its constituent societies depend. . . . America can offer fulfill-
ment. It has the means of renovation." Gardner is correct. It is not just
that we can afford to make self-fulfillment a supreme value; the point
is that the "pattern of social relations" known as American society
would fall apart completely if we did not arouse in all of our citizens
that "ache for self-fulfillment." But see it said officially: "Text of the
Report Submitted by the President's Commission on National Goals/*
New York Times, November 28, 1960:

Introduction. "The paramount goal of the United States was set
long ago. It is to guard the rights of the individual, to ensure his de-
velopment and, to enlarge his opportunity. . . ."

Part I. Goals at Home, (i) "The Individual." "The status of the
individual must remain our primary concern. All our institutions
political, social, and economic must further enhance the dignity of
the citizen, promote the maximum development of his capabilities,
stimulate their responsible exercise, and widen the range and effec-
tiveness of opportunities for individual choice.

"From this concern springs our purpose to achieve equal treatment
of men and women, to enlarge their incentives and to expand their
opportunities for self-development and self -expression. From it comes
our insistence on widely distributed political and economic power,
on the greatest range of free choice in our economy, and on tie fair
and democratic exercise of public and private power. It underlies the
value we put on education. It guides the pursuit of science. It is the
source of our interest in the health and welfare of every citizen [etc.]."
Without this value, we are collectively nothing.

20. C. I. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (La
Salle, 111.: Open Court, 1946), p. 486: "The final and ruling assess-
ment of value in experience must answer to the continuing rational
purpose directed to the comprehensive and consummatory end of a
life found good on the whole." It should be said that there is nothing
passive nor accommodating about Lewis' interpretation of this state-
ment. Yet he is unconcerned also with the social milieu of experience,
a milieu which insists that each experience must be less than its ulti-
mate, and continued growth in depth and intensity of each experi-
ence is a moral requirement transcending merely finding experience
good on the whole.

21. See Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth The Strug"
gle Toward Self -Realization (New York: Norton, 1950). Her analy-
sis of the "ideal self' and case studies of its tyranny over possible self-
growth are revelatory of exactly the point we are making. For a
particularly poignant study of how the creed of self -fulfillment makes
its impact on the teaching profession, see Arthur T. Jersfld, When
Teachers Face Themselves (New York: Columbia University, Teach-
ers College, 1955)-

22. See Larrabee and Meyersohn, op. cit. 9 for some instances.

Notes and Beferences

Chapter Nine

THE CORPORATE SOCIETY AND EDUCATION

i. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiog-
raphy ^(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946; first issued 1907), p. 456.
Adams' Autobiography is a valuable source for some of the changes
affecting America during tie last half of the nineteenth and early
years of the twentieth centuries. His pithy comments on the formal
education he received are a salutary antidote for some of the ro-
mantic nostalgia for education in the good old days. Recently there
has been a revival of interest in his writings, as evidenced by the is-
suance of Elizabeth Stevenson (ed.), A Henry Adams Reader (New
York: Doubleday, 1958). "The New York Gold Conspiracy" in this
collection contains some observations on the uses of corporations. W.
H. Jordy, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1952), is a recent authoritative analysis.

2,. Adams, Autobiography, p. 500.

3. The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (Santa
Barbara, Calif.), an offshoot of the Fund for the Republic, has spon-
sored a number of discussions on problems affecting the relations be-
tween corporations, government and law, public welfare, the indi-
vidual, jind related topics, under the general title of "The Free
Society/* The advice and participation of several prominent Americans
have been elicited in this endeavor, and pamphlets authored by several
of these have been issued. Two of these, The Corporation and the
Economy (1959) and The Economy Under Law (1960), containing
text by W. H. Ferry and edited notes of the participants' discussions,
are particularly relevant. The published remarks reflect a common
deep concern, but also widely divergent views about what should be
done. See also Chester I. Barnard, Elementary Conditions of Business
Morals (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1958.

4. See Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: from Bryan to
F.D.R. (New York: Knopf, 1955), as a recent evaluation of this era.
Lawrence A. Cremin, in his Transformation of the Schools (New
York: Knopf, 1961), shows the relation between the progressive move-
ment and education.

5. See chap, xxi, 'The Gospel of Wealth and Constitutional Law,"
in Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought
(New York: Ronald Press, 1956). In this chapter Gabriel creates an
extraordinarily insightful synthesis of the philosophical and social
currents in American Me which led the Supreme Court, in the i88o"s
and subsequently, to transform "the old due-process clause into an
instrument with which it built the individualism of the gospel of
wealth into a constitutional law of the nation* (p. 298). In the proc-
ess, he notes, the Supreme Court developed the antithetical "doctrine
of the police power of the states'* (p. 298), a concept drawn from

362 : Notes and References

Jacksonian democracy that the people rule, and the regulation of
private property is an exercise of the people's powers in the states.

6. The Sherman Act was invoked more often (between its passage
and the passage of the Clayton Act) against unions than against cor-
porations, "and it is significant that while working men have been
sent to prison under the Act, no case appears ... in which an officer
of one of the great corporations has ever been imprisoned" (Harold
Laski, The American Democracy [New York: Viking Press, 1948], p.
209),

7. See Alexander Flick (ed.), History of the State of New York
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), Vol. VI.

8. Louis M. Hacker, The Triumph of American Capitalism (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1940), p. 435.

9. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, "The
Magnitude and Distribution of Civilian Employment in the U.S.S.R.
1928-1959," Series P-95, No. 58 of International Population Reports
(April, 1961), p. 57.

10. Carey Me Williams in his Factories in the Field (Boston: Little
Brown, 1939) gave us one of the first descriptions of corporately
organized big business in agriculture. A subsequent study by Walter
Goldschmidt, As You Sou? (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), con-
trasts the effects of different types of agricultural organization upon
the form of community. He found that big organization was not -a nec-
essary complement to the efficient use of technology and science, but
that where corporation farming flourished, communities did not. John
Steinbeck has given us two novels of the plight of migratory agri-
cultural workers (there are two million of these in the United States) :
Grapes of Wrath (New York: Viking Press, 1939), and In Dubious
Battle (New York: Viking Press, 1939).

11. The corporately organized grocery chains now account for 39
percent of all sales. I.G.A. affiliates do 47 percent and unaffiliated in-
dependents only 14 percent (New York Times, July 2, 1961).

12. See Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown (New York: Har-
court, Brace, 1929), and Lloyd Warner and Josiah Low, The Social
System of the Modern Factory (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1947). Both of these studies describe the internal social changes in
community life stemming from the introduction of the factory system.

13. John Kenneth Galbraith demonstrates in the first several chap-
ters of his American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing
Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952) that the concept of the
"competitive model," based upon theories of classical economics, does
not fit the power concentrated oligopoly or crypto-monopoly of mod-
ern industrial organization. He contends that insecurity about the
present system arises from the ideas which interpret the world, not its
reality.

14. Warner discovered over eight hundred voluntary associations
in Newburyport, Mass, a town of 15,000 persons. For a detailed de-

Notes and References . 333

scription of the types and activities of these groups, see Lloyd Warner
and Paul Lunt, The Social Life of a Modern Community (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1941), chap xvi.

15. See William Lloyd Warner, American Life: Dream and Reality
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), chap. ix.

16. The common interests which bring suburbanites into associa-
tions are focalized around school and children, locality, and church.
These activities are almost entirely female dominated. Male participa-
tion occurs spasmodically and grudgingly. See John R. Seeley, R.
Alexander Sim, and E. W. Loosely, Crestwood Heights (New York:
Basic Books, 1956), and the account of Park Forest in William H.
Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1956) . In contrast, Elisabeth Day's study of an established German
and Irish neighborhood in New York City's West Side, containing
39,000 persons in 1956, of which about one-third were recent Puerto
Rican immigrants, contained ninety-five organized groups. Of these,
only nineteen could be counted as voluntary associations. The re-
mainder were public or private agencies, including schools, churches,
welfare agencies, and the like. Voluntary associations were absent
among the Puerto Ricans. (Methods of Community Organization in
Urban Renewal [unpublished doctoral thesis, Columbia University
Teachers College, 1958].)

17. A new national association for the overweights is called TOPS
(Take Off Pounds Sensibly) and has enrolled 14,000 members with
great future expectations for growth.

18. William McDonald (ed.), Documentary Source Book of Ameri-
can History, 1606-1926 (New York: Macmillan, 1928), p. 20. Quoted
by Earl Latham in Edward S. Mason (ed.), The Corporation in Mod-
ern Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 320.

19. The concept of "countervailing power" developed by Galbraith
in his American Capitalism is advanced as a regulatory mechanism to
restrain economic power where competition has disappeared. The
restraint becomes vested in strong buyers. He believes that "the pro-
vision of state assistance to the development of countervailing power
has become a major function of government perhaps the major
domestic function of government" (p. 133). The legislative assistance
given to labor unions in their struggle to establish bargaining power
with the corporations is cited as one example of the indirect control
exerted by government upon corporate power. One significant conse-
quence arising from the growth of countervailing power has been the
strengthening of "the capacity of the economy for autonomous self-
regulation" which lessens "the amount of overall governmental con-
trol or planning that is required or sought" (p. 155).

20. One does not have to search far for authoritative conclusions
to support the view. For example, Abram Chayes ("The Modern
Corporation and the Rule of Law," in Mason (ed.), op. cit.) has de-
clared that the great corporation is the dominant nongovernmental

364 : Notes and References

institution of modern American life: "The university, the labor union,
the church, the charitable foundation, the professional association
other potential institutional centers are all in comparison both pe-
ripheral and derivative " He quotes William T. Gossett, vice president
and general counsel of the Ford Motor Company, as saying, "During
the past 50 years, industry in corporate form has moved from the
periphery to the very center of our social and economic system. In-
deed, it is not inaccurate to say that we live in a corporate society"
(p. 27) . Peter F. Drucker, in Concept of the Corporation (New York:
John Day, 1946), calls the large business unit "the very center of mod-
ern industrial society," and the corporations "our representative social in-
stitutions" (p. 5), A. A. Berle, Jr., in The 2oth Century Capitalist Revo-
lution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954) , feels the need to justify his
treatment of the corporation, "not as a business device, but as a social
institution in the context of a revolutionary century" (p. 24). Future
historians of social thought may marvel at this insistence on the right
to consider the corporation as a social institution, but the fact is that
in 1950 this orientation was novel.

21. The concentration of wealth and productive power in the
hands of a few industrial giants has been the subject of a number of
studies. Those frequently cited include reports of the Temporary Na-
tional Economic Committee (TNEC), especially Clair Wilcox, Com-
petition and Monopoly in American Industry (Washington, D.C.:
TNEC, 1940), Monograph No. 21; Robert A. Brady, Business as a
System of Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943); M.
A. Adelman, "The Measurement of Industrial Concentration/' Review
of Economics and Statistics, Vol. xxxii, No. 4 (November, 1951); A. A.
Berle and Gardner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private
Property (New York: Macimllan, 1932); National Resources Plan-
ning Board, The Structure of the American Economy (Washington,
D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1939), Part I; Federal Trade Com-
mission, The Concentration of Productive Facilities, 1947 (Washing-
ton, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1949). See also other writings
by Berle and Galbraith. The Wall Street Journal regularly reports the
continuing concentration of economic control.

22. John Marquand, Sincerely, Willis Wayde (Boston: Little
Brown, 1955)-

23. Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons (New York:
Grossett and Dunlap, 1918).

24. See Norton Long, "The Corporation, Its Satellites, and the
Local Community," in Mason (ed.), op. cit., pp. 202-217. He writes
(pp. 214-215): "While their economic position has made the man-
agers seem to be the appropriate and duty-bound incumbents of top-
level civic statuses, their lack of family legitimacy and enduring local
residence identification in the community makes them more the

Xjsentatives of a foreign power than the rightful chiefs of the local
." Long's lively treatment of his subject leaves little doubt of the

Notes and References . 3^5

deleterious effects of corporations upon the local community.

25. Cameron Hawley, Executive Suite (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
iQS^).

2,6. Long, op, cit. y pp. 209, 211.

27. Chester I. Barnard, The Functions of the Executive (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1938). This study is a classic in its
field and has had wide influence. Barnard's insistence that ultimate
authority rests with the one who executes an order and not the super-
ordinate is a novel idea, and recalls Jeremy Bentham's dictum that co-
ercion can never win allegiance.

28. See Galbraith, op. cit., pp. 121-123, 1 4 2 -

29. F. W. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1911).

30. Two significant findings which are o particular relevance to
us should be mentioned. In the Philadelphia textile mills study the
extension to the employees of even a modicum of control over their
working situation, and a reduction in the volume of supervisory direc-
tion, increased output, but also led to marked beneficial changes in
their personal lives (Elton Mayo, The Social Problems of an Industrial
Civilization [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945], chap. iii).
In the Western Electric Study, the results obtained from the Relay
Assembly Test Room demonstrated the powerful effect of an experi-
mental setting when combined with an approach which dignifies an
activity (F. J. Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson, Management
and the Worker [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940]. See
also Elton Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization
[New York: Macmillan, 1933], and F. J. Roethlisberger, Management
and Morale [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941].) For rea-
sons which are only partly understandable, the Mayo "approach" has
been bitterly attacked. The major complaint seems to be that an elite
management will apply the results to freeze workers in a happy and
docile state. There is no evidence as yet that such is the case. For
an example of the anti-Mayo position see Clark Kerr and Lloyd Fisher,
"Plant Sociology: The Elite and the Aborigines," in Mirra Komarov-
sky, (ed.), Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, 111.:
Free Press, 1957), PP 281-309. Conrad M. Arensberg and Geoffrey
Tootell present an able counterview in the same volume, entitled
"Plant Sociology: Real Discoveries and New Problems" (pp. 310-
337).

31. Chris Argyris, Personality and Organization (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1957). Argyris summarizes a massive body of evi-
dence to demonstrate the debilitating effects of industrial organiza-
tion upon the worker. It is his contention that the needs of organiza-
tions and those of individuals are incompatible.

32. Ibid.

33. See Solon T. KimbaU and Marion Pearsall, The Talladega
Story: A Study in Community Process (University, Ala.: University

366 : Notes and References

of Alabama Press, 1954), chaps, vi, vii. This is a description of the
isolation of workers within the community, their cultural characteris-
tics, and the implicit conflict between them and industrial managers*

34. Ellwood P. Cubberly, Public School Administration (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1916), p. 338: "Our schools are, in a sense, fac-
tories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and
fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The
specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-
century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its
pupils according to specifications laid down. This demands good tools,
specialized machinery, continuous measurement of production to see
if it is according to specifications, the elimination of waste in manu-
facture, and a large variety in the output/*

35. Ibid., p. 435: "In a rapidly increasing number of our cities the
best principles of corporation control have been worked out and are
being put into practice in the educational organization. In such the
board of education for the city acts much as the board of directors
for a business corporation, listening to reports as to the progress of
the business, approving proposals as to extensions or changes in the
nature of the business, deciding lines of policy to be followed, approv-
ing the budget for annual maintenance, and serving as a means of
communication between the stockholders and the executive officers/*

36. Mark Atwood, An Anthropological Approach to Administrative
Change: The Introduction of a Guidance Program in a High School
(unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1960). This
study describes the adversely disturbing effects among staff resulting
from the introduction of a guidance program in a New York City high
school. See also Howard S. Becker, "The Teacher in the Authority
System of the Public School," Journal of Educational Psychology xxvii
(i953)> 128-141.

37. The theory of educational administration as taught in teachers
colleges has been a major contribution to the "chain of command"
plan of organization. V. T. Thayer, in an analysis published in 1933
("The School: Its Task and Its Administration III," in William BL
Kilpatrick [ed.], The Educational Frontier [New York: Appleton-Cen-
turyl, chap, vii), demonstrates the direct influence of business organi-
zation by quoting from the authors of standard texts on school ad-
ministration. He quotes (p. 220) from a study by George Counts of
a superintendent in Chicago who upon assuming office announced that
the schools "must adopt the motto of other big business: Organize,
deputize, supervise/" The effect was to sanction centralized control
in the superintendent's office and downward delegation of authority
"until it reaches the individual child in his relation with the teacher."
Thayer condemned this system, showed its ill effects, and proposed an
alternative approach. See also note 11 in chap, v of this book.

Thorstein Veblen, in The Higher Learning in America (New York:
Huebsch, 1918), asserted that American universities are directly or in-

Notes and References . 367

directly dominated by business. For him, college presidents were
blurred carbon copies of captains of industry. It must be admitted that
universities, like other institutions, sometimes suffer from authoritarian
leadership; however, the organizational pattern of a university is con-
siderably different from industry because of its great emphasis upon
the educative process. Simon Marcson's distinction between executive
authority and colleague authority is particularly helpful in distinguish-
ing the organizational emphasis. The latter is characteristic of a uni-
versity, but Marcson also found that professional employees in an in-
dustrial research laboratory sought to work as colleagues and, as a
consequence, found themselves in conflict with the executive authority
system. His analysis (The Scientist in American Industry [Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University, Industrial Relations Section, 1960]) is
directly relevant to school organization,

Chapter Ten

THE NATUKE OF COMMITMENT: A COMPARATIVE APPROACH

i. The reader will probably note that in comparison with other
chapters, this one contains relatively few references to the standard
literature. There is a reason for this which deserves a word of ex-
planation. In our initial discussions which eventually led to the de-
cision to join together to write a book about American education, we
posed a number of questions, one of which was the meaning of "com-
mitment." We concluded that until we had some agreement and some
understanding of what we meant when we used this term that we
would not be able to proceed in any profitable or orderly fashion in
our endeavor. We also believed that unless we were able to find some
rationale that would enable us to identify the major commitment or
commitments of American society, it would be impossible to eval-
uate the past performance or project the future requirements of
education and the educative process for our type of society. Our first
step was to seek enlightenment from the existing literature. This effort
proved relatively fruitless. Undoubtedly, someone, somewhere has
concerned himself with the nature of commitment. We have been un-
able to find any such reference, and such references as we did uncover
treat commitment in such a superficial manner that they could not
serve our purposes. We decided that before we could proceed further,
we would be forced to develop a theory of commitment within which
we could organize our substantive material. Accordingly, working in-
dependently and with a minimum of consultation, we set to the task.
It should be remembered that each of us, from necessity, utilized those
assumptions, method of logic, reasoning, and concrete data that were
distinctive to our respective disciplines of anthropology or philosophy.

368 : Notes and References

Because of this, our first analyses were widely different except in one
crucial respect: both of us were forced to conclude that the concept
"commitment" belongs in the category of objective, public phenom-
ena such as "citizenship" rather than in the category of personal, in-
ternal states of individuals such as we mean by terms like "pain" or
"joy." For us, this was a discovery of great import since it denied the
currently accepted doctrine which explains commitment as a purely
personal matter and, in addition, challenges the assumptions and
validity upon which a great deal of teaching is based. Further ex-
ploration has strengthened our belief in the correctness of our original
position.

To correct a misinterpretation that might arise from a casual read-
ing of the inti eduction to this chapter, we are not advocating corpo-
ratism over individualism, whatever that might mean. On the contrary,
as we have explained at various points, our analysis is directed toward
an education that will heighten individuality within this corporate
age What we are trying to overcome in this chapter is the verbal
and conceptual confusion that arises when one tries to describe com-
mitment as if it were a property possessed by individuals.

An acknowledgment and a further word of explanation seem nec-
essary. Most of the material describing Irish familism and Navaho
tribalism was gathered by direct field research by one of the authors.
The original analysis utilizing these materials was first presented at
the 1957-58 Faculty Seminar of the Institute for Religious and Social
Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. Sub-
sequently, the paper was read and commented upon by Dr. C. M.
Arensberg, a colleague in the Irish research.

2. For a description of Irish familism, see Conrad M. Arensberg
and Solon T. Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1940).

3. Many anthropologists and popular writers have cultivated the
Navaho field and a complete bibliography would run to several hun-
dred titles. For a description of tribal life from which much of this
section was taken, see Solon T. Kimball and John H. Provinse, "Nav-
ajo Social Organization in Land Use Planning," Applied Anthropol-
ogy* I (1942), 18-25. The best-rounded account of Navaho life is
found in Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea Leighton, The Navaho
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1946). A recent excellent
monograph is Tom T. Sasaki, Fruitland, New Mexico: A Navaho
Community in Transition (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1960).

4. A good discussion of initiation ceremonies may be found in the
recently published translation of Arnold van Gennep's classic, The
Rites of Passage (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1960).

5. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (New York: New American
Library, 1948), pp. 63-64.

6. Katherine Spencer, Mythology and Values: An Analysis of
Navaho Chantway Myths (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society,

Notes and References ; 369

This monograph did not become known to the authors until
after the original analysis and conclusions about the nature of com-
mitment among the Navaho had been written. Naturally, we were
pleased and excited to discover the startling correspondences be-
tween the realities of social behavior and the symbolic representation
of these in supernatural mythology as analyzed by Miss Spencer. The
material presented here represents a severe condensation of her
elaborate analysis.

Chapter Eleven

THE SYMBOLS OF COMMITMENT: AND INSTITUTIONAL LIFE

1. John L. Childs, Education and Morals (New York: Appleton-
Century-Crofts, 1950)., p. 7.

2. Compare this to the discussion in chap, viii on the prescribed
rituals that center around science, particularly medical science In
those cases there is complete congruence between the acts and the
subjective beliefs. In the case of Christmas shopping the connections
are attenuated at best. It is not right to say that the ritual is meaning-
less; it is correct to say that its social meaning may have no relation
to the thought and feelings of those who do it.

3. Scientific studies of the pre-World War II United States mili-
tary establishment are simply unavailable. There have been many
studies since, particularly the massive "Studies in Social Psychology
in World War II." See especially Samuel A. Stouffer et al., The Amer-
ican Soldier, Adjustment During Army Life (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1949), chap, ii, "The Old Army and the New."

In thinking of the days before World War II, one must remember
that the United States had the vast international commitment of a
major world power, yet even as late as 1940 had a Regular Army of
only 165,000 men. See Robin N. Williams, Jr., American Society
(New York: Knopf, 1951), pp. 235-237. See also Morris Janowitz,
Sociology and the Military Establishment (New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 1958), pp. 15-24, 28-36.

4. See Jesse Stuart, The Thread That Runs So True (New York:
Scribner's, 1949).

5. See Jerome Maurice Page, A Survey and Analysis of Teacher
Recruitment Policies and Practices, Including an Analysis of Teacher
Supply and Demand (unpublished EdD. project, Columbia Univer-
sity, Teachers College, 1958), Part II Page's study makes it clear that
high mobility within the profession is a continuing feature of educa-
tional life and that recruitment practices, pension and welfare schemes,
etc., should be adjusted to this fact.

6. Different aspects of the work of the Citizenship Education Pro-

370 : Notes and References

ject are reported in many documents, including among others: Re-
sources for Citizenship; Laboratory Practices in Citizenship Education
for College Students; and Building Better Programs in Citizenship.
The last, written by William S. Vincent, Hall Bartlett, Lora Tibbetts,
and James Russell, is the most instructive on the nature and purpose
of the project, and chap, xvii is a very informative historical review
of citizenship education in American schools. These are publications of
the project, and are available from Teachers College, Columbia
University.

7. See Vincent et al, op. cit., p. 13.

8. This is an overstatement, of course. It assumes that the corporate
structure on one hand (chap, ix) and the nuclear family on the other
(chap, vii) are the only structurally significant institutional forms. This
is coming more and more to be the case, but there are vestigial or-
ganizations, such as the fraternal lodge and its female auxiliary, in
which age and sex are the predominant bases for interpersonal rela-
tions. But in the corporate world, including the voluntary associations
and the small group production teams by which work gets done, age
and sex have little structural significance.

Chapter Twelve

THE ELEMENTS OF COMMITMENT AND SENSE OF SELF

i. It would be very difficult to overestimate the importance of this
fact: our political symbols have taken on a radically different cast as
they have lost their involvement with the unique history of America.
In the days of lie Revolution, America stood for universal rights of
man; her fortunate location across the Atlantic merely allowed her to
realize what was actually inherent in the universal, liberalizing tra-
ditions of the Enlightenment. This is the meaning the "shot heard
'round the world/* But by the time of the Gettysburg Address, there
were two reasons for Americans to believe in Tom Paine's view of the
uniqueness of the American experience more than in Thomas Jeffer-
son's (earlier) views that America represented the first instance of
what would or could become the lot of all mankind: the general suc-
cess of reaction in Europe and the devotion to America engendered
by the war itself. Then followed the dizzy days of European colonial-
ism and the gradual dominance in America of a Manifest Destiny to
export not merely American ideals but the American experience it-
self, particularly the experience of absorbing enormous numbers of
immigrants into the main body of American Life. The highpoint of
this wave was Wilson's tragic mission to Europe in 1918-19.

Two sobering facts have since emerged: (i) our political ideals
have no concrete meaning apart from the rich complexity of Amer-
ican life itself, and (2) this complexity has its origin in a historical

Notes and References . 371

experience that cannot be exported. What can be exported is the set
of symbols, the language of politics as it were, which has served us
well in solving some of our political problems. Because these symbols
have been abstracted from widely divergent histories, their meaning is
often not altogether understood alike by all who use them. But even
so, if it had not been for Wilson's success in forcing Europe to talk
in the typical American language of "self-determination/' "democracy/*
"freedom for all men/' and the like, the United Nations would never
have been possible. (It is conceivable that it would not have been
necessary, for undoubtedly those political symbols were more than
minimal factors in loosing the revolutionary forces that brought on
World War II.) On the general topic of American political thought
and language, see R. H. Gabriel, The Course of American Demo-
cratic Thought, rev. ed. (New York: Ronald, 1956). On the immi-
grants* relation to the symbols, see Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted
(Boston: Little Brown, 1953).

As we now see irony everywhere in history, we may see it here
also. The same political symbols that no longer have direct, organic
connection with the American scene, that are for us abstract rather
than historically mediating, may come alive again in those nations
that are now in the early stages of transition from agrarianism to in-
dustrialism. But as they come alive in Africa or Asia or South Amer-
ica, they will belong then to the Africans, etc. We have proprietary
rights on our history, but not on any particular way of describing it.
See Russell Davenport #t at, The Permanent Revolution (New York:
Prentice-Hall, 1951).

2. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1956); Floyd Hunter, Community Power Structure (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953); Karl Popper, The
Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1952); Charles Frankel, The Case for Modern Man (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1955), and on and on. The diagnosis differs in
each case, but the symptom of irresponsibility (or, less loaded, "un-
responsiveness") of power is agreed on by practically all who study it.

3. There may be a clue here for criticizing and refining the well-
known thesis of Gunnar Myrdal concerning the levels of American
values and the depth of "the American Creed'* (An American Di-
lemma [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944], Appendix i, pp. 1027-
10 35)- On the connection between the political symbols and the
emerging creed of self-fulfillment that grew out of them, see James
Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (New York: Blue Ribbon Books,
iQS 1 ) especially the concluding chapter.

4. David Riesman et at, The Lonely Crowd (Garden City: Double-
day Anchor Books, 1954), pp. 2,00-2,02,. Cf. Riesman, "Private People
and Public Policy/* reprinted in Best Articles and Stories (April,
1959), PP- 46-56.

5. The strongest case against modernism, of course, is not merely

372 j Notes and References

that it creates an age of anxiety, but that it fails to produce the stable
character and personality that can live with anxiety. Erich Fromm has
made this the main thesis of all his works since 1937. When he comes
to talk of a new communal life as an answer to this deficiency, he
talks nonsense. Compare the telling social criticism in chaps. 1-5 of
The Sane Society (New York: Rinehart, 1955) with the weak ro-
manticism of chap. 8.

6. This must exclude, in the final analysis, the Christian existen-
tialists, for their conception of selfhood must always include one rela-
tion to God. But for some of the other existentialists see Hollo May
et al., Existence, A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology
(New York: Basic Books, 1958). For the bravado in William EL
Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York; Doubleday, 1957),
see chap. xxv.

7. Henry Adams, Mont-St. Michel and Chartres (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1922).

8. See Chapter IX above.

9. J. Frederic Dewhurst and associates, America's Needs and Re-
sources (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1955), chap. xx. The
production of that magnificent volume itself represents precisely the
sense of the team within corporate structure that we have been de-
scribing.

10. The team enterprise shown in the remarkable television pro-
gram produced by Edward R. Murrow on the first launching of the
Atlas missile reminded one very much of the old silent films showing
Lindbergh's precarious takeoff from Mitchell Field.

11. Excellent bibliography in Max Lerner, America as a Civiliza-
tion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), for chap, iv, "The Culture
of Science and the Machine."

12. See George C. Homans, The Human Group (New York: Har-
court, Brace, 1950); also Wilbert Moore, Industrial Relations and the
Social Order (New York: Macmillan, 1951).

13. Lewis E. Atherton, Main Street on the Middle Border (Bloom-
ington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1954).

14. G. H. Mead, Charles Morris (ed.), Mind, Self, and Society
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), P- 152.

15. Cf . Harry Stack Sullivan's discussion of how the pre-adolescent
of this age chooses a chum (The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry
[New York: W. W. Norton, 1953], chap. xvi). Sullivan virtually ig-
nores the effect of social stratification as a factor, but he makes it quite
clear that choosing is occurring where hitherto there had been random
acceptance or rejection of playmates. Sociometric studies make it
plain that social distinctions do play a significant role in the dynamics
of choice. Compare Bernice L. Neugarten, "Social Class and Friend-
ship Among School Children," American Journal of Sociology, II
(194*), 305-313.

16. This is as convenient a point as any to make reference to James

Notes and References : 373

S. Coleman's factually irrelevant and conceptually inadequate study
of adolescent life (The Adolescent Society: The Social Life of the
Teenager and Its Impact on Education [Glencoe, 111.: Free Press,
1961]). Its irrelevance comes from treating the status system among
adolescents (yes, there actually is a recognizable status system in
each of the ten schools studied by Coleman!) quite out of relation
either to the life history of the youngsters themselves or to the sur-
rounding systems of family, class, corporation, and community. To
say that this study is conceptually inadequate is to judge the main pro-
posals, namely that the fundamentally hostile and aggressive status
drives among adolescents (perfectly understandable phenomena when
seen either developmental^ or systematically) be manipulated
"channeled" is Coleman's word by administrators and teachers so as
to increase attention to academic studies. If one can overcome his ini-
tial rejection, there is a great deal of information here that with a
different conceptual treatment could be quite interesting, particularly
the sometimes rather subtle differences between the symbols and ob-
jects around which the main status systems develop in different schools,
ranging from the farm community to the upper income metropolitan
suburb; also manner and degree of integration between the girls'
hierarchies and the boys' has latent significance, but Coleman has not
showed it. As an unrelated afterthought he remarks that "a boy or
girl has no experience, either in his daily life or school classes, with
the impersonal world of large institutions" (p. 328). He proposes to
remedy this basic gap in their education by having them play Monop-
oly on computers, status points going to the otherwise socially de-
prived academic grinds. Extraordinary!

Chapter Thirteen

EDUCATION FOR COMMITMENT

i. 'That human nature and society can have conflicting demands,
and hence that a whole society can be sick, is an assumption which
was made very explicitly by Freud. ... He starts out with the premise
of a human nature common to the human race, throughout all cul-
tures and ages, and of certain ascertainable needs and strivings in-
herent in that nature.' 7 Thus writes Erich Fromm in The Sane Society
(New York: Rinehart & Co., 1955), p. 19. Though Fromm makes
essentially the same assumption, he has a slightly different conception
of what human nature is. The pragmatic conception is set forth in John
Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Henry Holt & Co.,
1922) . An interesting but now anachronistic statement of the behavior-
ist position on human nature is given in E. L. Thorndike's Human
Nature and the Social Order (New York: Macmfllan, 1940). Perhaps

374 : Notes and References

we have too quickly forgotten the gist of Thorndike's thesis (p. 957) :
"Man has the possibility of almost complete control of his fate, and if
he fails, it will be by the ignorance or folly of men."

2. The interpersonal relations approach tends to blend with the
human nature approach; for in much of modern thought human na-
ture, as opposed to man's biological nature, is a product of social ex-
perience. But then to hold with a doctrine of universality in human
nature, one would have to show or see universals in social experience.
Some do just this. (See Gardner Murphy, Human Potentialities, New
York: Basic Books, 1958.) Others who begin with interpersonal re-
lations move away altogether from any dependence on a theory of
human nature. Some outstanding work has resulted from this ap-
proach; e.g., Kurt Lewin, Field Theory in Social Science (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1951); also Harry Stack Sullivan, The Inter-
personal Theory of Psychiatry (New York, W. W. Norton & Co. 1953),
especially Part I and Chapter 22. The most thoroughly consistent
statement of this view as it relates to education and morals is put
forth by R. Bruce Raup, especially in his essay, "The Community
Criterion in Judgmental Practice." Studies in Philosophy and Educa-
tion, September, 1960.

3. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (Glencoe: The Free Press,
1960). Especially relevant is his essay on the plight of ideology in the
USSR, "Ten Theories in Search of Reality," pp. 300-334.

4. This point has appeared frequently in the many books dealing
with "Madison Avenue." But it is made especially clear in a curiously
neglected volume called The Pacifiers, by Mack Hanan (Boston: Lit-
tle, Brown and Co., 1960), especially its Conclusion, p. 285 et seq.

5. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1951), Vol. I, pp. 18-28, 163-168. "Man occupies a pre-
eminent position in ontology not as an outstanding object among
other objects, but as that being who asks the ontological question and
in whose self-awareness the ontological answer can be found." This
is Tillich, but it could as easily be St. Thomas Aquinas or Immanuel
Kant.

6. We do not argue that a social system, by virtue of its primordial
influence on the mind and personality, is the ultimate reality in
human experience, i.e., that reality which cannot be transcended by
human concepts. That argument can be made very effectively. See
David Bidney, Theoretical Anthropology (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Pi ess, 1953); and Theodore Brameld, Cultural Foundations
of Education (New York: Harper's, 1957), especially Part II. But it
is unnecessary, from our point of view, to argue that social system is
primary in a metaphysical sense. It is primary in a political-psycho-
logical sense. The fundamental problem of men today, especially in-
tellectuals, is that of learning to accept, not the perfection or even
goodness of our social system, but its simple existence.

7. Politics, i#54a, i2$5b.

Notes and References : 375

8. There are many amusing tales of the pre-Civil War militia and
its "Annual Muster," but probably none surpasses that of Lincoln's
service in the Illinois militia during the Black Hawk War. See Ida Tar-
bell, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, (New York: The MacmiHan Co.,
1924) Chapter VI.

9. Just as Plato could not describe the good society and then say
what kind of education it required. To raise the question of the na-
ture of justice forced him almost immediately into a discussion of
education for the good Me.

10. See Percival M. Symonds, The Dynamics of Parent-Child Re-
lationships (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949).

11. Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W. W. Norton
and Co., 1950), pp. 106-107.

12. This is a favorite thesis of novelists and sociologists alike; com-
pare Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road, (Boston: Little, Brown &
Co., 1961), with John R. Seeley, R. Alexander Sim, E. W. Loosley,
Crestwood Heights, (New York: Basic Books, Inc, 1956), p. 57.

13. The dominant theme is usually this: different social classes have
different ways of dealing with the various tasks weaning, toilet
training, etc. involved in child rearing. These differences have con-
sequences in personality that relate, again, to the differences in social
class. There is obvious sense in this, but as we view the current scene,
social class is coming to be less significant as a mode of social stratifica-
tion than it was earlier. The more significant mode will likely be posi-
tion in the corporate system, a mode that, unlike social class, does not
need a stable geographical base. See Allison Davis, Social Class In-
fluences Upon Learning, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1948). For cross-cultural comparisons, see J. W. M. Whiting and I. L.
Child, Child Training and Personality (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1953). In most cultures, including the class structure analyzed
by Davis, child-rearing in its most crucial early months and years
could be regarded as setting the basis for the particular personality
type required for a certain range of positions in a stable social sys-
tem. All of that assumption is now doubtful if not patently false.

14. Somewhat dated, but very human is Dorothy Baruch, Parents
and Children Go to School, (Chicago: Scott, Foresman & Co., 1939).

15. Harry Stack Sullivan, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry,
(New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1953).

16. See Chapter XL

17. Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child, (London: Kegan
Paul, 1932). But see also, Barbel Inhelder and Jean Piaget, The
Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence, (New
York: Basic Books, 1958) . The latter seems to show that by age seven
or eight, the simpler operations of the prepositional calculus are
already part of the thinking process in children, provided, of course,
that the content of the propositions is sufficiently concrete and mean-
ingful to the children. The whole question of possibility in childhood,

376 : Notes and References

as opposed to usual performance o children, is one for which we have
yet to formulate a feasible experimental design.

18. William K. Medlin, et aL, Soviet Education Programs, (Wash-
ington: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1960).

19. Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science, (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and World, Inc., 1961), Chapter V, "Experimental Laws and
Theories/*

20. Paul Ziff: "Reasons in Art Criticism" in I. Scheffier, (ed.)
Philosophy and Education, (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1957), p. 2230. In
the analysis of the discipline of esthetic form we are indebted to a
series of discussions on the topic with Prof. Arno Bellack of Teachers
College, Columbia.

21. Cf. A. Irving Hallowell: "Aggression in Saulteaux Society" in
Clyde Kluckhohn, Henry A. Murray, and D.N. Schneider, (editors)
Personality in Nature, Society, and Culture (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 2nd Edition 1956), pp. 246-260.

22. We are well aware that it takes neither special courage nor
exceptional insight to stand up in favor of intellectual discipline at
a time when aggressive militarism depends on academic prowess. We
honor those who urged the same principles when there were better
reasons and fewer causes for doing so. See Harry S. Broudy, Building
a Philosophy of Education, (New York: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1954).
Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9 as well as references therein. Also Philip H.
Phenix, "Key Concepts and the Crisis in Learning/' Teachers College
Record. 58: 137-143 [December 1956]. The theses (i) that there is
a discipline (or set of disciplines) of thought and action right within
the life of the culture, (2) that the young can learn these in such a
way that they are not merely controlled by external forces but by
personally-accepted knowledge, and (3) that such knowledge frees
the individual from the pain of feeling robbed when paying the
psychic costs attendant on living in our civilization these theses
curiously are presaged throughout the very fine work by K. B. Berk-
son, The Ideal and the Community, (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1958).

Very careful and detailed analyses are needed before the nature
of intellectual discipline itself can be determined. Bruner and his as-
sociates have tried two ends of the chain, as it were: the phenomenon
of concept formation at its most primitive on one hand and the phe-
nomenon of scientific behavior on the other. See Jerome S. Bruner,
Jacqueline Goodnow, and George A. Austin, A Study of Teaching
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1956) and Jerome S. Bruner, The
Process of Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960).
A vigorous and quite readable defense of what we may call the uni-
tarian view of intellectual discipline is found in H. Gordon Hullfish
and Philip G. Smith, Reflective Thinking: The Method of Education
(New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1961). Hullfish and Smith are
seeking a single method or process of thinking that encompasses the

Notes and References : 377

disciplines we have described. For a treatment of the more specific
discipline we have called natural history, see Solon T. Kimball, "Dar-
win and the Future of Education," The Educational Forum, Novem-
ber 1960, pp. 59-72.

Chapter Fourteen

MORAL COMMTIMENT AND THE INDIVIDUAL

1. For a very clear-headed critique of this talk about mass non-
conformity, etc., see Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (Glencoe; The
Free Press, 1960), chap. i.

2. The phrase, "oceanic feeling," was used by Sigmund Freud to
mean, "a feeling of indissoluble connection, of belonging inseparably
to the external world as a whole." Needless to add, Freud could find
no evidence for such a feeling in himself. Civilization and Its Discon-
tents (London: The Hogarth Press, 1930), p. 9 et seq.

3. The problem of reconciling a Marxian theory of social system
with the allocation of personal responsibility for concrete actions has
not been an easy one for Soviet social philosophy. See Herbert Mar-
cuse, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1958), chap. 10, "Soviet Ethics The Externalization
of Values."

4. For a fuller treatment of the distinction between reasons and
motives and the place of this distinction in various theories of human
nature, see R. S. Peters, The Concept of Motivation (London: Rout-
ledge and Kegan Paul, 1958).

5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Mari-
anne Cowan, (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1955), p. 114. "We have
no other choice; we must seek new philosophers, spirits strong or
original enough to give an impulse to opposing valuations, to trans-
value and turn upside down the 'eternal values'." (Written in 1885).
Poor Nietzsche. Those who really did away with the idea of deducing
values from the nature of God (or the God of nature), who put man's
will back to its central place in ethics, were not at all terrifying super-
men, but a group of very mild-mannered, innocuous English and
Viennese philosophers like G. E. Moore and Moritz Schlick. In a
decent orderly society, most human beings eventually, though not
without travail, grow up to have decent, orderly wills.

6. Some suggestions for a suitable education in this regard are
found in James E. McClellan's 'Why Should the Humanities Be
Taught?" Journal of Philosophy, Vol. LV, No. 23 [Nov. 6, 1958], pp.
997-1108.

7. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Farrar and
Rinehart, 1941). T. W. Adorno, E. Frenkel-Brunswik, D. J. Levinson,

J7S ; Notes and References

and R. N. Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper
& Brothers, 1950).

8. Which is not to say, of course, that statistics and theory of
games are never useful tools in solving social problems. See James E.
McClelland "Theory in Educational Administration/' School Review,
Vol. 68 [Summer, 1960], pp. 210-227.

9. Paul Goodman: "The Calling of American Youth," Commentary,
March, 1960, pp. 217-229. The way Mr. Goodman describes the rat-
race is frighteningly familiar; however the world may actually run,
surely this is our usual way of talking and thinking about it.

10. We are aware that others before us have held stark and un-
compromising views that bear some resemblance to what we are as-
serting here. We are aware that in the 1920*5, a period that in its
apparent affluence superficially resembled our own times, views sim-
ilar to ours were asserted by men who later recanted in the face of
events depression, Fascism, etc. they took to be signs of social dis-
integration. We do not discount the strength of the super-rationalists
on one hand and the irrationalists on the other who would attack our
theses. See the "Epilogue for 1957" to Morton G. White, Social
Thought in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), pp. 247-281, and
William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy
(Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1958). But we should like
to make this much clear: whatever may be the case with others whose
views are in some ways like ours, we are not propounding a doctrine
of dark despair, we are not praising a soul-less wasteland. We are
describing a world with limitations and restrictions, but withal the
locus (if there is one) of man's encounter with love and self -fulfill-
ment. In short, the world may be different from our description of it.
If so, we welcome new facts that show us where our perceptions were
wrong. But we despise, in advance, the critic who objects to our con-
ception of education on the grounds that it lacks a sufficient basis in
morality.

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INDEX

Academic disciplines, and the disci-
plines of thought and action,

,,, ,

\d hoc groupings, 273-74
UDAMS, HENRY, i86-88, 264, 361,
372

U>AMS, JAMES LUTHER, 346

yDAMS, JAMES TRUSLOW, 6$, 76, 334,

338, 339, 371

U>AMS, SAMUEL, 52
VDELMAN, M. A., 364

Vdolescence, as cultural phenome-
non, 293

U>ORNO, T. w., 377

idulthood, concept of,
in Ireland, 2,2,6
in metropolis, 236-37
among Navahos, 229-31
in town-community, 235-36

\.ge and sex,

as cultural dividers, 55-57
as factors in family life, 252-53
as relevant to moral rules, 310-11

^GEE, JAMES, 336

'Agrarian outrage," 224
Agrarian society,
absolutes in, 53
ceremonials in, 74-75
child role in, 74
family in, 71-79
dispersal of, 77-79
guilt and anxiety in, 274-75
mobility of, 79
female role in, 75-76
male role in, 72-73
in transition, 90
Vgrarian world view, 51
Vgrarianism, historical background

of, 64-66
image of, 69
midwest, 66-82
UKIN, w. M., 347

ULGREN, NELSON, 124, 35 *

Mice Adams (Tarkington), 85, 342
Vlienation,

and commitment, 234-35, 263

of the individual, 61-62

of nineteenth century man from
God, 168

UJLFORT, GORDON, 359

American, The (Adams), 65

American Education: Facts,, Fancies,
and Folklore (Harris), 25,
327

American Institute of Biological Sci-
ences, 27

Amish, the, as an isolated society,
130

ANDERSON, SHERWOOD, 80, 341

Anonymity, in urban life, 245

ANSHEN, RUTH, 336

Anti-inteUectuafism, in education, 22
Anxiety, in the nuclear family, 274

AQUINAS, ST. THOMAS, 374
ARENDT, HANNAH, 331, 347
ARENSBERG, CONRAD M., 336, 349-

50, 351-52, 365, 368
ARGYRIS, CHRIS, 365
ARISTOTLE, 23, 136, 283, 284, 326,

Arrowsmith (Lewis), 48, 335

ASCHNER, M. J., 358
ASTOR, JOHN JACOB, 52
ATHERTON, LEWIS E. ? 341, 342, 372
ATWOOD, MARK, 366
AUSTIN, GEORGE A., 376

Authoritarianism, definition of, 60

AYER, A. J., 358

Babbitt (Lewis), 85, 342

BALDWIN, JOSEPH G., 340

BANCROFT, FREDERICK, 334

BARDOT, BRIGnTE, 60

BARKER, SIR ERNEST, 331

BARNARD, CHESTER, 2O6, 361, 365

BARRETT, WILLIAM, 378

BARTLETT, HALL, 370

BARTOK, BELA, 270

BARUCH, DOROTHY, 37$

BARZUN, JACQUES, 22, 3^6

BEARD, CHARLES, 334

BEARD, MARY, 334

BECKER, HOWARD S , 366

BELL, ALEXANDER GRAHAM, 48

BELL, DANIEL, 359, 374, 377

BELLACK, ARNO, 376

BENDIX, REINHARD, 359

BENEDICT, RUTH, 353, 368

BENET, STEPHEN VTNCENT, 53, 336-

37,340

BENNE, K. D., 343
BERGMAN, INGMAR, 36

396 :

Index

BERGSON, HENRI, 270

BERKSON, K. B., 376

BERLE, A. A., JR., 2,8, 30, 31, 32, 32Q-

30, 364
BESTOR, ARTHUR E., JR., 21-22, 24,

319, 325-26
SIDNEY, DAVID, 374
BELLY THE KID, 52
BODE, BOYD, 96, 97
BOHR, NIELS, 2.JQ
BOONE, DANIEL, $2
BORAH, WILLIAM, 97
BOULDING, KENNETH, 354
BRADY, ROBERT A., 364
BRAMELD, THEODORE, 348, 349, 374
BRATJN, WERNHEH VON, 266
BRIDENBATJGH, CARL, 338
BROOM, LEONARD, 335, 355
BROUDY, HARRY S., 376
BROWN, HARRIET CONNOR, 339, 341
BRUBACHER, JOHN S., 344
BRUNER, JEROME S., 331, 376

BURGESS, E. w., 143, 350, 354, 355

BURNS, HOBART W., 325
BUTTS, R. FREEMAN, 344, 347

CALDWELL, ERSKTNE, 153
CALHOUN, JOHN, 97
CASH, WILBUR J., 347

Cattle culture, 68

Celebrations, role of, in social con-
sciousness, 84

Celtic history, 225

Central Purpose of American Educa-
tion, The, 112

Chain stores, 194

Chantway myths, 230-31

CHAYEFSKY, PADDY, 125, 35*
CHAYES, ABRAM, 363-64
CHILD, I. L., 375
CHtLDE, V. GORDON, 335

Childhood culture, discipline of, 290
Children,

role in Agrarian society, 74

as symbols, 254

CHTLDS, JOHN, 1O9, 239-40, 344,

348, 369

Choice, in agrarian society, 138
and "forked road" example, 138-39
in the valuing process, 137-39

CHRIST, JESUS, 144, 234

Christianity,

in American society, 167-68
and "sense of the world," 264

Church and neighborhood, 149

Citizenship Education Project, 249-

52
Civic skills, 250

CLAPP, ELSIE R , 344

Classroom interaction, 292

CLAY, HENRY, 97

"Client" relationship, 207-08

COHAN, GEORGE M., 152
COLEMAN, J. S., 359, 37^-73

College entrance, 255-56
College teaching, responsibilities and
requirements of, 295

COMMAGER, HENRY S., 28, 358

Commercialism, 67

Commitment, and adulthood, 12-13

claimant, sponsor, symbol, 232-35

complexity, effect of, on 316-17

definition of, 9-10

and disciplines of thought, 303-04,
322

through taught dispositions, 240

and education, 242-43, 288-89

elements of, 240-41, 279-80

and its expression, 270

in family, 253-58

and individualism, 15-16, 177-82

among the Irish, 226

and mobility, 243

among Navaho women, 230

problem of, 11-16

and progressives, 107

relation to conflict, 232-35

and sense of self, 268

and sex roles, 12

and social phenomena, 219

and social structure, 268-77

teaching of, 11
Common Faith (Dewey), 103, 347,

349

Community, see also Corporate sys-
tem,
sense of, 133

CONANT, JAMES BRYANT, 24, 327
COOK, ELAINE FORSYTH, 345
COOK, LLOYD ALLEN, 345
COON, CARLETON S., 335

Corporate superstructures, 35

dependence on, 47

internal organization, 131

and spatial correlates, 132-33

and voluntary associations, 198-

200
Corporate system

and agrananism, 190-92

and community, 202-05

and individual, 210-11

and Main Street, 193-95

and mobility, 204-05

origin of, 200-01

and personal initiative, 314-15

and potentialities, 214-15

revolutionary aspects, 188-89
Corporations, see also Corporate sys-
tem,

characteristics, 189

Index

: 397

Corporations Continued

and efficiency, 206-07

and flexibility, 207

and internal organization, 205-06

and power, 30-31

and Supreme Court, 201
Cost of American society,

for freedom, 59, 314

to the individual, 164

psychical, 16

COTTRELL, L. S., JK., 335, 355

Countervailing power, 30

COUNTS, GEORGE, IOQ, 348, 366

Courtship and marriage, 145-46

COWAN, MARIANNE, 377
CRANKSHAW, EDWARD, 355

Creative genius, 270

CREMTN, LAWRENCE A., 343, 344,

345, 347* 361

CROCKETT, DAVY, $2,
CURBERLY, ELLWOOD P., 366

Cultural assent to American life, 16-

17

Curriculum, in Agrarian schools, 91
Custodial function, effect on the

individual, 208-09

DARWIN, CHARLES, 49, 98, 1OO
DAVENPORT, RUSSELL, 37!
DAVIS, ALLISON, 375
DAY, ELISABETH, 363

Death, changing concept of, 54, 276

DEBS, EUGENE VICTOR, 343
DELEON, DANIEL, 343

Democracy,

and education, 102, 319
Jacksonian, 65-66

DENNEY, REUEL, 330, 355

DEWEY, JOHN, 87-88, 96, 97, 98, 1OO,

103, 106, 108, no, 113-14,
138, 139, 33i> 343* 344, 346*
347, 349, 353-54, 373

DEWHURST, J. FREDERIC, 37^
DIAGHILEV, SERGEI, 152

Dialectical materialism, 281

DICKSON, WILLIAM J., 365

Dilemmas, moral, 311

Disciplines of thought and action,

297-304, 306-08
Discontent in children, as necessary

to learning, 286
DNA, 300
Dr. Zhivago (Pasternak), 6

DRUCKER, PETER, 28, 364
DUNCAN, ISADORA, 152
DUNCAN, OTIS D., 35 1
DURKHEIM, EMILE, 6l, 337
DWORKTN, MARTIN S., 344

EDDY, MARY BAKER, l6o

C2. o8-QQ

Education,

and commitment, 242-43, 288-89

critical literature on, 21-29

and democracy, 102, 319

and economics, 294

**life adjustment** approach, 21

as a moral enterprise, 239-40

among the Navaho, 228

and occupations, 293-94

power of administrators, 21

need for professional leadership,

25

and reform, 27

in towns, 82

transformation of, 33
Educational Policies Commission,

112

Educational reform, 185-86
Educationists, 4, 20, 40
Educative process, 36-38

and administration, 213

EINSTEIN, ALBERT, 49, 98, 178
EISENHOWER, DWTGHT D., 158
EMERSON, RALPH WALDO, 349

Emotions and commitment, 305

ENGELS, FRIEDRICH, 359
ENNIS, R. S., 349, 358

Entropy, 5, 9
Equalitarianism, 102-03

ERIKSON, ERIK, 286, 375

EROS and THANATOS, 281
Esthetic criticism, 302
Esthetic form, 301-03

EVAN, WILLIAM M., 330, 332

Excellence (Gardner), 23, 326, 359
Executive Stitfe (Hawley), 124, 204,

35i, 365
Expectations,

uncertainty of, 316
Experimentation, discipline of, 299
"Expressing personality,** 272-73

Face-to-face association, 269
Face-to-face participation, 84
Family,

and churches, 147

and commitment, 253-58

the companionate type, 143-44

in Ireland, 221

nuclear, 35, 56

and transvaluation of values, 146

and values, 136
Fascist symbols, 156-57

FAST, HOWARD, 151
FAULKNER, WILLIAM, 336
FERRY, W. H., 361
FISCH, MAX, 346
FISHER, LLOYD, 365
FISKE, JOHN, 334
FLICK. ALEXANDER, ^62

398 :

Index

FORD, HENRY, 48, 52, 244

Ford Foundation, 26
Formal disciplines, 298-99

FRANKEL, CHARLES, 28, 37!
FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN, 52, 165, l66
FRENKEL-BRUNSWIK, E., 377

FREUD, SIGMUND, 237, 373? 377
FRIES, HORACE S , 343
FROMM, E., 237, 372, 373, 377
Frontier, interpretation or, 65-66
Function of the Executive, The

(Barnard), 206

Fund for the Advancement of Edu-
cation, 26

GALBRATTH, JOHN KENNETH, 28, 3O,
31, 174, ^Oi, 329, 358, 362,
S^S, 364, 365

GARDNER, JOHN, 23, 326-27, 359
GARLAND, HAMLIN, 70, 74, 75, 78,

79, 339, 340, 341

GENNEP, ARNOLD VAN, 368

Gettysburg Address, 259

GDSDION, SIGFREED, 335
GELMORE, HARLAN W., 35O
GLASS, BENTLEY, 328
GLAZER, NATHAN, 330
GODKIN, EDWIN LAURENCE, 338
GOEBBELS, PAUL J., 281
GOLDSCHMIDT, WALTER, 362
GOLDWYN, SAM, 152
GOODE, WILLIAM J., 354-55
GOODMAN, PAUL, 378
GOODNOW, JACQUELINE, 376
GOSSETT, WILLIAM T., 364

Graduate school, and self education,

Grandmother Brown's Hundred
Years, 1827-1927, 73-74, 77,
339

GRANT, ULYSSES S., 173
GRANT, W. T., 194

Great Debate, 20

Group association, 276-77

GRUBER, FREDERICK C., 348
GUEST, EDGAR A., 152

Guilt, 76, 168, 274

HACKER, LOUIS M., 362
HAIRE, MASON, 359
HALDANE, J. B. S., 49
HALLOWELL, A. IRVING, 376
HAMILTON, ALEXANDER, 192
HANAN, MACK, 374
HANDLIN, OSCAR, 37!

Happiness, and values, 136

HARRIS, RAYMOND P., 24-25, 327-28
HAUSER, PHILIP M., 350
HAWLEY, CAMERON, 2O4, 351, 36$
HEGEL, GEORG, 282

HEMINGWAY, E., 151
HENRY, PATRICK, 52
HERBERG, WILL, 149, 355
HERSKOVITS, MELVILLE J., 336

High Noon (film), 36

HILL, CLYDE M., 325

History, sense of, 52, 133

HOFSTADTER, RICHARD, 361
HOMANS, GEORGE C., 372
HONIGMANN, JOHN J., 331
HORNBY, KAREN, 360

How We Think (Dewey), 98, 353

HOWE, E. W., 79, 341
HOWELLS, WILLIAM DEAN, 358
HULLFISH, H. GORDON, 376

Humanist view of technology, 266

HUME, DAVID, 1OO
HUNTER, FLOYD, 371
HUXLEY, THOMAS, 49

Individual, and state, 160

Individualism, 220, 321

and commitment, 15-16, 177-82
and political symbols, 158

TNGERSOLL, ROBERT, 79, 34!
INHELDER, BARBEL, 375

Instruction, fundamental principles

of, 291

Intellectual elite, 61
Interpersonal relations, in school, 289
Interpersonal tensions, 244-45

in the family, 258

among teachers, 248
Irish famihsm, 220-27
Irresponsibility, and symbols of com-
mitment, 260
ISE, JOHN, 81, 339, 342

J. B. (MacLeish), 164-65, 356

JACKSON, ANDREW, 115

JAMES, JESSE, 52

JAMES, WILLIAM, 138, 139, 353-54

JANOWITZ, MORRIS, 369

JEFFERSON, THOMAS, 52, 115, 19O,

192, 334, 370

JERSILD, ARTHUR T., 360
JORDY, W. H., 361

KANT, IMMANUEL, 374
KAPLAN, HYMAN, 157, SSS'S
KELLY, CHARLES ROBERT, 345, 347
KENNEDY, RENWICK C., 336
KERB, CLARK, 365
KHRUSHCHEV, N. S., 179, 359
KILPATRICK, WILLIAM HEARD, 96, 97,

100-01, 108, 345, 346, 366

KIMBAIX, SOLON T., 331, 336, 342,

365, 368, 377

KLUCKHOHN, CLYDE, 355, 368, 376

Index

: 399

KOMAROVSKY, MIRRA, 365

KOMISAR, B. PAUL, 349

KROEBER, A. L., 333, 33$, 355, 356

Labor unions, 29-30

LA FOLLETTE, ROBERT, 97

Land tenure, 68, 78
Land wars, in Ireland, 225

LAPHAM, SILAS, 358
LAPLACE, PIERRE, 1OO
LARRABEE, ERIC, 331, 35Q, 360
LASO, HAROLD, 356, 359, 362
LATHAM, EARL, 363

Learning, in the first years of school,

289

LEIGHTON, DOROTHEA, 368
LERNER, MAX, 5, 325, 334 33$, 350,

355, 356, 372

LEVTNSON, D. J., 377
LEWIN, KURT, 374
LEWIS, C. I., 101, 360

LEWIS, SINCLAIR, 48, 79, 85, 335, 341,

342,355

Libido, 243

LD2BERMAN, MYRON, 25-26, 328

"Lif e adjustment" approach to teach-
ing, 21

Life Force, 281
Life magazine, 253

LINCOLN, ABRAHAM, 52, lo8, 375
LINDBERGH, CHARLES A., 265, 372
LINDZEY, GARDNER, 359
LINTON, RALPH, 336, 353
LIPSET, SEYMOUR, 359

LOCKE, HARVEY j., 143., 354, 355
Lolita (Nabokov), 7, 9

LONG, NORTON, 2O4, 364, 365

LOOSLEY, E. w., 355, 363, 375

Love,

the church message of, 148

in family life, 144

as learned by the child, 285

"Love of country," 313-14

LOW, JOSIAH, 362

LUCE, R. DUNCAN, 358

X.UNT, PAUL, 363
LYND, HELEN, 194, 347, 362
LYND, ROBERT, 194, 347, 362
LYNES, RUSSELL, 122, 154, 35> 355

MCCARTHY, JOSEPH, 87

McCarthyism, 261

MCCLELLAN, JAMES E., 346, 349, 377,

378

MCDONALD, WILLIAM, 363
MCGUFFEY, WILLIAM, 92

Machine world, 265

MCKENZD2, RODERICK D., 350
MACLEISH, ARCHIBALD, 164-65, 356
MCMURRAY, FOSTER, 343

MCWILLIAMS, CAREY, 362
MADISON, JAMES. 113

Magnificent Ambersons, The (Tark-
ington), 85, 203, 342, 364

MAHAN, ALFRED, 334
MAILER, NORMAN, 162, 237

Main Street (Lewis), 85, 154, 341,
355

MANN, HORACE, 345
MARCSON, SIMON, 367
MARCUSE, HERBERT, 377
MARTTAIN, JACQUES, 312
MARQUAND, JOHN P., 85, 2O3, 342,
364

Marty (Chayefsky), 125, 351

MARX, KARL, 176, 28 1, 309, 359

Marxism, 156

MASON, EDWARD S., 363
MASON, ROBERT E., 356

Mass art versus high art, 151-54
Mass media, 304

MASTERS, EDGAR LEE, 79-80, 341

Materialism, 166

MATHER, COTTON, 179

Matrilineal descent, among Navahos,
227

MAY, ROLLO, 372

MAYER, MARTIN, 24, 327, 333

MAYO, ELTON, 2O7, 365

MEAD, GEORGE HERBERT, 6l, 272,

337, 372

MEAD, MARGARET, 28, 336, 356
MEANS, GARDNER C., 36
MEDUN, WILLIAM K.,
MELVILLE, HERMAN, 53
MERTON, ROBERT K., 335, 355

Metropolis, 34

demography of, 117-20
discontinuities in, 125-26
and neighborhood, 126-27
social class in, 121-22, 127

MEYERSOHN, ROLF, 359, 360

Middletown (Lynd), 194, 347, 362

MILLS, C. WRIGHT, 28, 29, 31, 32,

179, 329, 359, 371
Mobility,

in children, 287

college as preparation for, 255-56

in the community, 131-32

spatial, 57

among teachers, 247-48
Modernism, 262-63, 265

MONSTAKAS, CLARK E., 359
MONTAIGNE, M., 22
MOORE, G. E., 377
MOORE, WILBERT, 372

Moral teachings, 92

Moralism, among educators, 248

Morality, contemporary, 310

MORGAN, J. P., 52

400 :

Index

Merrill Act, 95

MORRIS, CHARLES, 372

Mother-in-law taboo, 227-28

Motives, 309-10

MUMFORD, LEWIS, 28, 335, 349

MUBDOCK, GEORGE P., 333
MORPHY, GARDNER, 359, 374
MURRAY, HENRY A., 355, 376
MURROW, EDWARD R., 372

"Mutuality," 255

MYRDAL, GUNNAR, 344, 371

NABOKOV, VLADIMIR, 7

NADEL, S. F., 333

NAEGELE, KASPAR D., 333, 353

NAGEL, ERNEST, 376

NASH, OGDEN, 152

National Science Foundation, 27
Natural history, 300-01
Navaho life, 227-31
Neighborhood, Jewish, 142-43

NEUGARTEN, BERNICE L., 372

"New Movement," 109

NICHOLS, ALICE, 337

NIEBUHR, REINHOLD, 65, 312, 338

NIETZSCHE, FRD2DRICH, 281, 317, 377

NORRIS, GEORGE, 97

NOYES, JOHN HUMPHREY, 358

"Obedience," 255

OGBUBN, WILLIAM F., 345

"Old Army," 246-47

OLSEN, EDWARD G., 345

Orderliness, 316

"Organization man," 31-32, 179-80,

3^5
Organization Man, The (Whyte)\

264, 330, 354, 358, 363, 372
'Other-directed," 31
Outline of History, The (Wells), 48,

335

PAGE, JEROME MAURICE, 369

PAINE, THOMAS, 112, 37O

PARES, RICHARD, 17, 325

PARK, ROBERT E., 350

PARKES, HENRY, 334, 335, 336, 338,

356

PARKINSON, C. NORTHCOTE, 359
PARRINGTON, VERNON L., 334, 336,

338-39, 357

PARSONS, TALCOTT, 333, 353, 355
PASTERNAK, BORIS, 6, 355

Peace Corps, 322-23

PEARSALL, MARION, 342, 365

Peer culture, 290

PEIRCE, CHARLES SANDERS, 346
PENNELL, JOSEPH STANLEY, 342
PENNEY, J. C , 194

PETERS, R. S., 377

PHENIX, PHILIP H., 347-48, 352, 376

Philosophy of education, 4-5

PIAGET, JEAN, 292, 331, 375
PICASSO, PABLO, 152

PIPES, RICHARD, 331
PITTS, JESSE R., 333, 353
Plains Indians, 306
PLATO, 23, 151, 326-27, 375
POE, EDGAR ALLAN, 53
Point of No Return (Marquand), 85,
342

POPPER, KARL, 326, 327, 371

Population, decline of rural, 192
Population density, 117-18

POTTER, DAVID, 357

"Power elite," 30

Pragmatism, 89

Pre-marital relations, in Ireland, 223

Privacy,

and art, 154

in the family, 143

and neighborhood relations,

140-

41

and religion, 148
Private world, 34-35, 183
Production team,

and sense of self, 266-67

and World War II, 276-77
Productive learning, 294-95
Professionalization, 249, 257
Progress, American growth and, 46,

70
Progressive education,

and agrarianism, 97-98

evaluation of, 110-14

and moral commitment, 107
Progressive Movement, 88, 102, 190
Progressives, 96-97

educational purpose of, 111

theory of intelligence, 98-99

values of, 101-04

world view of, 99-101
Progressivists,

and democratic socialism, 113-14

and religion, 105
"Project method," 108-09
"Promised land, 42, 67, 69, 165
Propaganda, 242
PROVTNSE, JOHN H., 368
Puberty rites, 229
Public world, 34-35

RABELAIS, FRANCOIS, 22
RAIFFA, HOWARD, 358
RAPHAEL, 151

"Rat-race-and-withdrawal,** 319-22

RAUP, R. BRTJCE, 374

Reconstructionists, 109-10

Index

: 401

Recruitment of teachers, 94

BEEP, HENRY H., JR., 35O

Religious freedom, 105

RHODES, CECIL, 357

RDESMAN, DAVID, 17, 28, 31, 32, 262,

325, 326, 330, 331, 371

Rites of passage, 169

and the neighborhood, 141

ROCKEFKT.T.KR, JOHN J., 52
ROETHLISBERGER, F. J., 36$
ROGOFF, NATALIE, 359
ROOSEVELT, THEODORE, 187
ROSENBERG, BERNARD, 355
ROSTEN, LEO, 355
RUSSELL, BERTRAND, 89, 343
RUSSELL, JAMES, 370

Russia, 296

race between America and, 277

SAGAN, FRANCHISE, 60
SALINGER, J. D., l62
SANDBURG, CARL, 1O3
SANDOZ, MARIE, 344
SANFORD, R. N., 378
SAPIR, EDWARD, 332
SARTRE, JEAN PAUL, 142
SASAKI, TOM T., 368
SCHAP1RO, MEYER, 355
SCHAUB, EDWARD L., 347
SCHEFFLER, I., 376

SCHILPP, P. A., 343
SCHLESINGER, ARTHUR M., JR., 28

SCHLICK, MORTTZ, 377
SCHNFJDER, DAVID M., 355, 376
SCHNEIDER, HERBERT W., 343

School,

first years of, 288-93

as transition period, 34, 39, 40,

258

Schools, The (Mayer), 24, 327
Schools,

agrarian, 91-96

and bureaucracy, 184-85

and commitment, 13-14

conservatism in, 95

and cultural heritage, 40

intermediate position of, 183

local control of, 93-94

and money, 25

organization of, 211-13

rural, 77 . . o

standardization in, o

transformation of, 89, 104
Science,

and education, 171-72

and history, 172-73

and progress, 173

and the purpose of life, 181-82

and research, 48

Science Continued

and rewards, 50

and technology, 45

and theology, 168
Scientific rationality, 307

SCOTT, C. WINFIELD, 325

Seasonal rituals, 244

SEELEY, JOHN" R., 355, 363, 375

Self, and identity, 61
SeH-fulfilhnent, 237-38

and commitment, 179

and leisure, 175

and marriage, 175-76

and production, 176

and science, 177

and standard of living, 174-75

and work, 175
Selfhood, 12

achievement of, 263-64
Sense of self, 262
Separatism,

cultural, 127-28

and esthetic values, 151

physical, 126-27

social, 129
Settlement pattern,

of Los Angeles, 123-24

of metropolis, 119-21

of the railroad city, 120-21
Sex role, 272-73

SHAFFNER, BERTRAM, 337
SHEVKY, ESHBJ2F, 351

smLS, EDWARD, 333, 353

SIM, R. ALEXANDER, 355, 363, 375
SIMON, HERBERT A., 354

Sincerely, Willis Wayde (Mar-

quand), 203, 364
Skill training, 93
Slavery, 283
SMITH, AL, 58

SMITH, B. O., 349, 358

SMITH, HENRY NASH, 69, 336, 337,

339

SMITH, PHTLEP G., 376

SMITH, ROBERT PAUL, 143, 2QO

"Smooth** human relations, 280

"Smooth" personal relations, 245-46

SNOW, c. P., 358

Social class, 58-59, 68

in metropolis, 121-22, 127

in town-community, 82-86, 129-30

Social mobility, 58, 81-82, 129, 178-

79

Social participation, 283
Social reconstructionism, 14-15
Social system,

moral demands and the, 309

and sense of self, 313

SPENCER, HERBERT, 64

402 :

Index

SPENCER, KATHERINE, 230-31, 368-69
STANLEY, WILLIAM O., 343
STEIN, MAURICE R., 347
STEINBECK, JOHN, 362
STEVENSON, ELIZABETH, 361
STOUFFER, SAMUEL A., 369
STRAUSS, CLAUDE LEVI, 333

Street Corner Society (Whyte), 125,
351

STUART, JESSE, 340-41, 369

Suburban growth, 117

SULLIVAN, HARRY STACK, 291, 372,

374,375, r
Supernatural, belief in, among Nava-

hos, 231

"Supervisory" relationship, 208
Symbols,

in American life, 155-56, 251

and disaffection, 159

and education, 158-59

in European life, 156

historical content of, 260-61

political, 280-81, 312-13

religious, 161, 312

SYMONDS, PERCIVAL M., 375

TARBELL, IDA, 375

TARKINGTON, BOOTH, 85, 2O3, 342,
364

Task-orientation, 271

TAYLOR, F. W., 206, 365

Teacher autonomy, 213
Technology, 44-46

and social organization, 46-47
"Tempered pessimism," 296
Tensions, town and country, 80-81

THAYER, V. T., 34$, 366

THOMAS, W. I., 137, 353

THORNDIKE, E. L., 373~74

TIBBETTS, LORA, 370

TILLICH, PAUL, 28, 312, 346-47, 374

TINTORETTO, 1$1

TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE, 196, 334,

344
"Togetherness," 145

TOLMAN, EDWARD C., 353

Tom Sawyer (Twain), 98-99, 290

TOOTELL, GEOFFREY, 365

Town life, novelists of, 85-86
Towns, social organization of, 83
Tragedy, 52-53
TROW, M., 359
TRUMAN, HARRY, 170, 358
TUNNARD, CHRISTOPHER, 35O
TURNER, FREDERICK JACKSON, 65, 338
TYLOR, EDWARD B., 49

Upper Bohemians, 154

Valuing,

and esthetics, 150-55, 161
and government, 155-62
and range of choice, 137-39

VANDERBILT, CORNELIUS, 52
VEBLEN, THORSTEIN, 113, 366-67
VERNE, JULES, 48
VINCENT, WILLIAM S , 370

Voluntary associations, 195-200
and corporate superstructures,

198-200

function of, in the town-com-
munity, 196-97

WARNER, W. LLOYD, 29, 337, 362-63

WASHINGTON, GEORGE, 52, 108

WATT, JAMES, 44

WEBSTER, DANIEL, 97

WELLS, H. G., 48, 335

WEST, JAMES, 336, 341

WHEELER, ROBERT, 33O

Where Did You Go? Out. What Did
You Do? Nothing (Smith),
143, 290

WHITE, DAVID MANNING, 355
WHITE, MORTON G., 378
WHITEHEAD, ALFRED, 49? 333 34^

WHrnNG, j. w. M,, 375

WHITNEY, ELI, 52

"Whole child, the" 103

WHYTE, W. H., JR., 28, 31, 32, 125,

330-31, 351, 354, 358, 363,

37^

WILCOX, CLAER, 364
WILLIAMS, MARILYN, 351
WILLIAMS, RAYMOND, 17, 325
WILHAMS, ROBUST N., JR., 357, 369

WILLIAMS, TENNESSEE, 237
WTLLKEE, WENDELL, 26 1
WILSON, WOODROW, 261, 370-71
WITTGENSTEIN, LUDWIG, 358

WOLFE, THOMAS, 53, 85, l6l-62, 342
WOOD, ROBERT C., 351

Work,

and freedom, 181

and play, 180

and self, 180
Worship, 308-09

YATES, RICHARD, 375

YMCA, 290

You Can't Go Home Again ( Wolfe ),
85, 342

YOUNG, BRIGHAM, l6o

ZACHARIAS, JERROLD, 27
ZIEGFIELD, FLORENZ, 152
ZEFF, PAUL, 302, 376

1 32 766