Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget: Our Progressivist Inheritance ... Spencer, Herbert Spencer, and Jean Piaget - Softcover

Egan, Kieran

Softcover

ISBN 10: 030010510X ISBN 13: 9780300105100

Verlag: Yale University Press, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

The ideas upon which public education was founded in the last half of the nineteenth century were wrong. And despite their continued dominance in educational thinking for a century and a half, these ideas are no more right today. So argues one of the most original and highly regarded educational theorists of our time in Getting It Wrong from the Beginning. Kieran Egan explains how we have come to take mistaken concepts about education for granted and why this dooms our attempts at educational reform.

Egan traces the nineteenth-century sources of Progressive thinking about education and their persistence even now. He diagnoses the problem with our schools in a radically different way, and likewise prescribes novel alternatives to present educational practice. His book is both persuasive and full of promise—a book that belongs on the must-read list for anyone who cares about the success of our schools. 

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Kieran Egan is professor of education at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. A recipient of the Grawemeyer Award in Education, he is also author of the best-selling book The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding and many other books and articles about education.

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Getting It Wrong from the Beginning

Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean PiagetBy Kieran Egan

Yale University Press

Copyright © 2004 Kieran Egan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780300105100

Chapter One

THE STRANGE CASE

OF HERBERT SPENCER

I will describe the essential ideas of progressivism through the work of the least well known of my subtitle's stars, Herbert Spencer. Although John Dewey's educationnal ideas are widely known today, in many regards, they are built on the bases laid by Spencer, though Dewey harnessed them to quite different social and political agendas. The third figure I consider, Jean Piaget, wrote two books about education, but neither advances progressivist theory much; Piaget's contribution lies rather in his developmental ideas. Spencer's formulations are important because nearly everyone involved in establishing the new state schools in the late nineteenth century read them. The influence of ideas is rarely easy to establish, but it would be very odd to deny the author of these ideas an important role in shaping modern schooling and forming progressivist educational theory.

Apart from the huge number of publications of his various works, and their translations into many languages, Spencer was offered (and refused, where possible) honors from learned societies in the United States, England, Italy, Denmark, Belgium, Greece, Austria, and Russia. Some thinkers held what may seem now wholly extravagant valuations of his work. The novelist and critic Arnold Bennett, who read Spencer's First Principles on his honeymoonduring the winter of 1906-1907, wrote: "If any book can be called the greatest in the world, I suppose this can.... it is surely the greatest achievement of any human mind.... as a philosopher, he is supreme in the history of human intelligence" (1933, 192). Bennett, of course, was hardly an expert critic of philosophy, as he admitted, and maybe the conditions of the reading affected his delight in the text, but nonscholarly readers widely shared his view. Even someone as unlikely as Matthew Arnold wrote that he often read Spencer as a kind of bracing for his mind (Honan 1981). The American educator F. A. Barnard wrote, "We have in Herbert Spencer not only the profoundest thinker of all time, but the most capacious and most powerful intellect of all time. Aristotle and his master were no more beyond the pygmies who preceded them than he is beyond Aristotle" (Hofstadter 1955, 31). The Atlantic Monthly in 1864 declared: "Mr. Spencer has already established principles which, however compelled for a time to compromise with prejudices and vested interests, will become the recognized basis for an improved society" (776).

Spencer's name is so rarely mentioned in educational writings today that it is easy to forget how avidly his book was read and reread by pretty well everyone involved in making the new state schools. This was especially the case in the United States. The influential clergyman and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher wrote to Spencer in 1866 explaining that the "conditions of American society have made your writings far more fruitful and quickening here than in Europe" (Duncan 1908, 128). I am sure that many of the ideas I shall lay out here will be familiar, though perhaps readers will not associate them with Spencer: most tend to be credited to Dewey or taken as implications of Piaget's theories; or they are assumed to be products of recent notions like "constructivism" or even thought to have emerged from modern "grass-roots" practice. And of course, not all the ideas originate with Spencer-Locke andRousseau, to name two hardly forgotten figures, can also stake claims as originators. But Spencer is particularly interesting because his formulations were so influential at the crucial period when American public schools, and those of many Western countries, were being formed. And he wrapped these principles in the prestige of science, claiming them not as another set of philosophical speculations, such as those from the Swiss thinker Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827) or the German educators Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) and Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel (1782-1852), but as scientific hypotheses.

* * *

SPENCER'S EDUCATIONAL IDEAS

A context for Spencer's work includes two dramatic ideas that had created much intellectual ferment by the time his writings were becoming widely known. The first was articulated by the Scottish scientist Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875). As a young man Lyell studied law, but he later developed a consuming interest in geology. Between 1830 and 1833 he published his Principles of Geology, in which he argued that all the available physical evidence supported the view that the earth was not created, as was widely held, in 4004 B.C. This date had been calculated more than a century earlier by Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656), a renowned scholar and apparently a man of such charm and sweetness of character that his devotion to the royalist cause in England's civil war did not prevent him from being treated favorably by Oliver Cromwell or from being buried in Westminster Abbey. To arrive at this date, Ussher had totted up the years of the events in the Bible, counting backward carefully to the exact year of the creation.

Lyell argued instead that not only did a study of geology show evidence of gradual changes in the earth over immense spans oftime but the forces that had brought about those changes were continuing to operate in the present. In place of an instantly created world, which had remained stable at least since the major catastrophes mentioned in the Bible, Lyell proposed a long-established world that was in a constant state of much more gradual change.

One could now retain one's faith in a 4004 B.C. creation if one believed that God had made the world with marks of eons of past changes and the bones of extinct animals already in it. Yet that sophistication, with its image of a playful or mysterious God sprinkling the created earth with clues to forms of life that had never existed, was not an idea that attracted wide adherence. Instead, in the nineteenth century combatants clashed for and against the new scientific view that conflicted with the claims of the Bible, if read literally.

Into this growing conflict came the vastly more disturbing second idea, the theory of evolution as propounded by Charles Darwin (1809-1882). There had for a long time before Darwin been theories of evolution; indeed Spencer himself had been promoting evolutionary ideas for many years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. In his 1852 essay "The Development Hypothesis," Spencer had in fact used the word evolution and had propounded elaborate arguments about how it accounted for changes in history and society.

By the 1850s, then, many people accepted that some of the most widely held past beliefs about the world and about humankind's place in it were radically mistaken. For this receptive audience, Spencer published Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical in 1860. Here he argued that education, too, had been radically mistaken in the past. Education, he wrote, had been most often conducted by forcing irrelevant informattion into the minds of reluctant children by methods that were patently barbarous; instead, he proposed, we should draw on new scientific principles to make theprocess efficient as well as pleasant for the child. In the past, education had dealt with subjects that held their place in the curriculum...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Yale University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 030010510X
• ISBN 13: 9780300105100
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 218
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar