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The Open Mind
Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature
By JAMIE COHEN-COLE THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-09216-4
CHAPTER 1
Democratic Minds for a Complex Society
When America entered the Second World War, concern over the nation's disunity deepened and spread among its citizen body. A perception that unity was critical to the sustainment of national morale led many to call for efforts to promote social cohesion. Policy makers and intellectuals responded by conducting studies on the causes of religious, racial, and ethnic divisions. Community groups, labor and business organizations, and government agencies sponsored advertising campaigns and established discussion groups to further intergroup tolerance.
A distinctive feature of the thought and action on unity in this period was the emphasis placed on the role played by cultural and intellectual life. American social thinkers and policy makers, viewing culture as a primary determinant of social cohesiveness, worried about the corrosive effects of modern life. They feared that science and technology, expansion of knowledge, and resulting rapid change in daily life would fragment individual experience, tear social bonds, and dissolve the nation's coherence as a political entity.
The social and political impact of culture, particularly intellectual culture, was a theme that surfaced often and in wide-ranging arenas of discussion. In an address at the annual meeting of the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion (CSPR), David Lilienthal, director of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), went so far as to attribute the cause of the current world war to disunity produced by modern culture. In blaming disunity Lilienthal meant something more specific than the rivaling ideologies of Allied and Axis powers. He meant that the modern world had been fragmented by its "high degree of specialization of function." For illustration Lilienthal pointed to the variety of experts working for the TVA—specialists in fields ranging from electrical engineering to soil chemistry and dendrology. Expertise was a central fact of modernity, and in Lilienthal's view that expertise had become a barrier to meaningful communication, preventing people with different disciplinary training from understanding one another's work.
Remarkable as it may now seem that a high-ranking public official should locate the "root cause" of World War II not in Hitler's imperialistic ambitions but in modernity's excessive specialization, Lilienthal was addressing an audience who felt as he did. The CSPR had been formed out of the view that modernization, brought about by the growth of science and technology and resulting in ever-mounting forms of specialization, had produced a dangerous loss of common culture. As CSPR participants saw it, intellectual and spiritual disunity was chiefly responsible for the current "world crisis," and it was the largest threat from which America was to be guarded.
If intellectual and spiritual disunity was the greatest danger the world faced, then intellectuals and spiritual leaders themselves needed to recognize their agency both in producing and averting the crisis. CSPR participants, over one hundred fifty leading academics, theologians, politicians, and social commentators who gathered annually, made a point of discussing how they, with all the variety of philosophies and specialties they represented, embodied the problem they were trying to solve. They saw their own differences as undermining the stability of the world, and participants even charged others within the same conference with responsibility for the rise of fascism and abetting its totalitarianism. It was thus critical, in their shared goal of developing a common culture for American society, to find a resolution to the differences they represented. Was a free spirit of inquiry, or spiritual and religious values, more directly tied to democracy? Was democracy based on Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish faith in the dignity of man, or on freedom of thought, including freedom from religious doctrine? Did secular or religious values hold more promise as a way to unify culture?
Lilienthal and the CSPR were representative of a national sentiment that since the root of the modern world's ills was its fragmented intellectual culture, the proper way to cure world and national problems was to change that culture. Debates over the intellectual directions that the country should take occurred perhaps in their strongest form over educational policy and curriculum design. If rooting out modernity's problems meant changing intellectual culture, then fashioning a proper mental landscape for American citizens in their formative years surely had to be part of the cure.
A report put out by the Educational Policies Commission (EPC), a policymaking group appointed by the National Education Association and the American Association of School Administrators, expressed a view similar to Lilienthal's, that the war had not been "chiefly caused by the machinations of evil men," but was "largely a result of profound dislocations in the culture and social structure caused by the advances in science and technology." To address these dislocations the EPC recommended curricular innovations that would unify American students' educational experience and provide them with a foundation for their future lives as citizens. Like the CSPR participants who sought to unify American culture by reconciling their own intellectual differences, members of the EPC placed responsibility on intellectuals to produce unity in a diverse nation, which they would do by offering a properly designed educational experience.
The EPC played a large role in the world of education policy. It had a distinguished membership of nationally recognized leaders of education such as Edmund Day, president of Cornell, and George Zook, president of the American Council on Education. After the war, members included representatives from the U.S. Office of Education and the Carnegie Fund for the Advancement of Teaching; Dwight Eisenhower, then president of Columbia University; and Harvard president James Bryant Conant, one of most widely recognized experts on education and its relationship to social policy. In addition, the EPC was connected with several thousand well-placed consultants in education and media who advised the EPC on its reports and helped advertise and implement the reports once they were completed.
In calling for curricular innovation as a means to unify the nation, the EPC lent authority to a sentiment that was already in wide circulation. Precisely what form that innovation should take, however, was a contentious and long-debated question. To the intellectuals, educators, and policy makers who were involved in this debate, the stakes were particularly high. Resolution would determine what students encountered in the classroom, what kinds of people they would become, and the ultimate shape of society. It was not just the character of an abstract intellectual culture that was under discussion, but also what kind of minds made for right-minded citizens—for individuals who would become guardians of American society and its democracy.
The debate over curricular innovation came down to two sets of proposed solutions, characterized either as "liberal education" or "general education." These programs were both aimed at unifying the secondary and collegiate curricula. The differences between liberal and general education turned on how each sought to manage the growth of knowledge, the expansion of science and technology, and the modern world's increased social complexity. Would educators follow the general education model, in which science and technology would be central to a unified curriculum, or would these be treated as peripheral to the concerns of a liberal educational program defined by the great works of Western literature?
This chapter examines the debate over pedagogy that roiled education and policymaking circles in the 1930s and first half of the 1940s. I show how discussions were imbued with politics and with midcentury anxiety about the fracturing of the modern world. Questions of pedagogy frequently became philosophical discussions about the meaning of proper citizenship, the definition of a good society, and the true meaning of democracy. In the end, neither liberal education nor general education succeeded in achieving dominance. Solution came in the form of a synthesis developed at Harvard in 1943–45. The work of a committee of professors and outside consultants was to provide a vision of the right kind of mind for America that came to have lasting influence.
Educating for Unity
In the 1930s a sense grew within the education community that the American curriculum was fracturing. Some felt that changes in the university that had been accumulating since the late nineteenth century had destroyed curricular unity and undergraduate education. As these critics saw it, the introduction of electives had broken up a curriculum once anchored by Greek, Latin, mathematics, and moral philosophy and by the goal of disciplining mental faculties through the study of these subjects. Further, with growing emphasis on a research mission in universities, disciplines and departments proliferated as academics pursued increasingly focused and specialized work. Instead of offering broad instruction in their fields, professors opted to teach courses best suited to their majors and future graduate students. As a consequence undergraduates were faced with a collection of disparate, disconnected, narrow courses, each aimed at specialists.
Fracturing of the traditional curriculum was due not only to the introduction of electives but also to new subjects offered as a result of the Morrill Land Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890. These acts used funds from the sale of federal land to support the founding of colleges that would teach agriculture and mechanical arts. Responsible for the creation of large-scale state university systems, the acts made study of practical fields available to a large portion of people who went to college. Nonetheless, despite the radical transformation to the American university curriculum effected by these laws, critics in the 1930s paid more attention to the elective system than to the Morrill Acts.
Intensified calls for curricular change followed on this perceived fracturing of the curriculum. The general education movement emerged as a result, and interest in liberal education renewed itself. Leaders of the liberal education movement in the 1930s included Mark Van Doren of Columbia, Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, and philosopher Mortimer Adler. By contrast, early general education advocates were associated with less prestigious institutions and had a less public profile. They were able, however, to compensate for their disadvantage in standing by aligning themselves with John Dewey and Sidney Hook, who articulated positions that they often found compatible with their own.
Proponents of both pedagogical programs argued that a "cafeteria" style education served neither the student nor the nation. They contended that a new curriculum that would provide "unity" was needed. Such unity seemed to have several virtues. It would connect the various fields of knowledge to each other, it would connect academic study to the life of the individual student, and it would provide a means of forging stronger bonds between citizens and between individuals and society.
Although advocates of liberal and of general education both agreed that the curriculum should be more unified, the two camps had different goals. Liberal education advocates argued that modernity, science, and technology had destroyed "culture," which they defined as learning in the Western canon. Their aim was to restore to American society a vanishing elite, a body of cultivated individuals who had undergone a humanistic program of study. On the other side general education advocates sought to produce capable citizens. They too worried about "culture," but not in the sense meant by liberal education. General education advocates thought of culture in an ethnographic sense—the democratic values and ways of life that formed the bedrock of American society. In their view modernity, science, and technology were destroying the unity of that culture, separating citizens from one another and from decision makers. Their desire for common culture was instead oriented toward sustaining egalitarian democracy and community.
Beyond having opposing visions of what kind of American to cultivate, the two camps differed in their views of appropriate educational content and method. Liberal education was committed to teaching the classics, especially religion, philosophy (metaphysics in particular), and literature. Education in science was felt to be of peripheral importance, if not actually inimical to study of the humanistic tradition. Truth was viewed as universal and something to be taught, not discovered. In contrast, those in favor of general education either included or emphasized the teaching of science and technology, and espoused the relative or pragmatic nature of truth. They urged scientific teaching methods, and often secular, modern, progressive, and student-centered approaches. Knowledge was to be used for practical ends.
Structural aspects of existing curricula dissatisfied members of both groups, but the reasons for their dissatisfaction were quite different. Liberal education advocates faulted academic disciplines as overly narrow, while those in favor of general education characterized them as impractical and disconnected from real-life student interest, abilities, and needs.
What each diagnosed as the root problem conditioned the nature of the cure they prescribed. To remedy what they saw as a problem of insularity produced by disciplinary knowledge, liberal education advocates hoped to build connection between citizens through a store of common knowledge provided by the great works of Western literature. Since impracticality and disconnectedness from real life was the problem for general education advocates, they called for curricula that would either be "unified" by the interests of the individual student or by their relevance to the contemporary world.
The cures prescribed by one group ran counter to the problems diagnosed by the other. The kind of practical learning that the general education camp supported was precisely what was deplored in liberal education circles as materialistic and unintellectual. General education advocates, for their part, found it hardly "democratic" that the entire American population would be interested in and prepared to read the great books of the Western world. The liberal education program was in their view as elitist as the traditional disciplinary teaching that liberal education advocates criticized.
In 1943 James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard and future head of the EPC, joined this debate by establishing a committee to develop a general education program that would serve the needs of postwar America. At the time he was serving as chairman of the National Defense Research Council, a part of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which was devoted to developing weapons, including the atomic bomb, for prosecuting the war.
Between his trips to Washington, D.C., to oversee the Manhattan Project and other wartime scientific developments, Conant turned his thoughts to reshaping America through educational reform. Drawing an analogy to the wartime service of scientists like himself, Conant thought of putting faculty not so directly involved in the war effort to work securing the peace. These faculty would shape the postwar nation by defining what the objectives of general education in a free society should be.
Over the course of the next two and a half years, the committee Conant formed often met several times a week for several hours a session. Discussions and reports during these meetings drew on the views and testimony of over seventy-five consultants, who ranged from state and city commissioners of education to preparatory school headmasters, sociologists specializing in education, union representatives, and theologians. In their discussions and final report, the committee members and their consultants considered and sought to offer a final answer to the problem of national unity.
The meeting transcripts provide a unique picture of the social thought of mid-twentieth-century America. Because the committee preserved the day-to-day and even minute-to-minute record of their activities, we are able to witness a more candid, less carefully edited and measured view of education and democracy than what the committee put into published form. The transcripts also archive the social thought of individuals who, whether because of their field of specialty or because of their social position, left no other record of their ideas about what constituted citizenship and the good society.
In its meetings and final report, the committee articulated an ambitious pedagogical philosophy for the nation. General Education in a Free Society (often called the "Red Book" for the color of its cover), published in 1945, contained both plans for the country's future and a method for achieving them through the shaping of student minds. The report gave an account of democracy and a definition of right-minded citizenship, and it added chapters on curricula for all colleges and high schools and for Harvard in particular. It provided, in addition, a political vision for how America could remain a democracy even while fundamental social functions were removed from the sphere of politics and public deliberation to be managed by experts or state bureaucracies.
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Excerpted from The Open Mind by JAMIE COHEN-COLE. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.
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