During the 1920s, however, radical writer Lincoln Steffens wrote positively about Mussolini’s Fascism as he had more famously written positively about Soviet Communism.36 As late as 1932, famed novelist and Fabian socialist H.G. Wells urged students at Oxford to be “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis.”37 Historian Charles Beard was among Mussolini’s apologists in the Western democracies, as was the New Republic magazine.38 The poet Wallace Stevens even justified Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia.39 #51 | | |
W.E.B. Du Bois was so intrigued by the Nazi movement in the 1920s that he put swastikas on the cover of an issue of a magazine he edited, despite protests from Jews.40 Even though Du Bois was conflicted by the Nazis’ anti-Semitism, he said in the 1930s that creation of the Nazi dictatorship had been “absolutely necessary to get the state in order” in Germany, and in a speech in Harlem in 1937 he declared that “there is today, in some respects, more democracy in Germany than there has been in years past.”41 More revealing, Du Bois saw the Nazis as part of the political left. In 1936, he said, “Germany today is, next to Russia, the greatest exemplar of Marxian socialism in the world.”42 #52 | | |
The heterogeneity of those later lumped together as the right has allowed those on the left to dump into that grab-bag category many who espouse some version of the vision of the left, but whose other characteristics make them an embarrassment to be repudiated. Thus the popular 1930s American radio personality Father Coughlin—who was, among other things, an anti-Semite—has been verbally banished to “the right,” even though he advocated so many of the policies that became part of the New Deal that many Congressional Democrats at one time publicly praised him and some progressives urged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to make him a Cabinet member.43 #53 | | |
During this early period, it was common on the left, as well as elsewhere, to compare as kindred experiments Fascism in Italy, Communism in the Soviet Union and the New Deal in the United States.44 Such comparisons were later as completely rejected as the inclusion of Father Coughlin as a figure of the left was. These arbitrary changes in classifications not only allowed the left to distance themselves from embarrassing individuals and groups, whose underlying assumptions and conclusions bore many similarities to their own, these classification changes also allowed the left to verbally transfer these embarrassments to their ideological opponents. Moreover, such changes in nomenclature greatly reduced the likelihood that observers would see the negative potential of the ideas and agendas being put forth by the left in its bid for influence or power. #54 | | |
The kinds of concentrations of government power sought by the left may be proclaimed to be in the service of various sorts of lofty goals, but such concentrations of power also offer opportunities for all sorts of abuses, ranging up to and including mass murder, as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot demonstrated. These leaders did not have a tragic vision of man, such as that underlying what is called “conservative” thought in America today. It was precisely these dictators’ presumptions of their own vastly greater knowledge and wisdom than that of ordinary people which led to such staggering tragedies for others. #55 | | |
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Given the very different conceptions of knowledge by those with the tragic vision and those with the vision of the anointed, it is virtually inevitable that they would have different conceptions of the role and competence of the young. Where knowledge is conceived of as more or less the kinds of things taught in schools and universities, and intelligence is conceived of as sheer brainpower in manipulating concepts and articulating conclusions, there is no inherent reason why the young would not be at least as accomplished in such things as the old, since brain development is said to reach its peak in early adulthood. Moreover, the young, having been more recently educated, have the advantage of the most updated and newly discovered knowledge. As the Marquis de Condorcet said in the eighteenth century: “A young man now leaving school possesses more real knowledge than the greatest geniuses—not of antiquity, but even of the seventeenth century—could have acquired by long study.”45 #57 | | |
This is yet another example of how one conceives of knowledge affects how one conceives of other things, including in this case the relative advantages of youth and age. Views such as those of Condorcet contrast with the views of those with the tragic vision, where consequential knowledge is often mundane knowledge, accumulated by experience, and wisdom is also primarily distilled from experience. Therefore, almost by definition, the younger generation is not usually in as good a position to make wise decisions—for themselves, much less for society—as those who have much more experience to draw upon. #58 | | |
Accordingly, those with the vision of the anointed have for centuries put great hopes in the young, while those with the tragic vision have relied far more on those with mature experience. #59 | | |
The 1960s notion that “we should learn from our young people” had antecedents going back to the eighteenth century. Such subsidiary social phenomena as lowering the voting age, and reducing the deference to the older generation in general and to parents in particular, are likewise very consistent with, if not inescapable corollaries from, the over-all conception of knowledge and intelligence prevalent among those with the vision of the anointed. Where social problems are seen as being consequences of existing institutions and prejudices, the young are often seen as less wedded to the status quo, and thus as hopes for the future. #60 | | |
Back in the eighteenth century, William Godwin articulated this argument when he said, “The next generation will not have so many prejudices to subdue.”46 Children, according to Godwin, “are a sort of raw material put into our hands.”47 Their minds “are like a sheet of white paper.”48 At the same time, they are oppressed by their parents and must go through “twenty years of bondage” before they receive “the scanty portion of liberty, which the government of my country happens to concede to its adult subjects!”49 Clearly the young have been seen as candidates for “liberation,” both of themselves and of society, in this view—a view still very much alive among intellectuals, more than two centuries later. Advocates of “children’s rights” are advocating rights that children themselves obviously will not be exercising, so this amounts to another way for third party surrogates to intervene in families, without having to pay any price when they are wrong. #61 | | |
All these conclusions change completely, however, if knowledge and wisdom are conceived as they are conceived by those with the tragic vision. Adam Smith, for example, said, “The wisest and most experienced are generally the least credulous.” In short, the old are generally not as susceptible to heady notions, according to Smith: “It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough.”50 The zeal and enthusiasm of the young, much praised by many of those with the vision of the anointed, have long been seen very differently by those with the tragic vision. Burke, for example, said: “It is no excuse for presumptuous ignorance that it is directed by insolent passion.”51 Some have even referred to a perennial invasion of civilization by barbarians, namely the new-born, whom families and social institutions must civilize, because they enter the world no different from babies born in the days of the caveman. #62 | | |
People with opposing visions of the world do not simply happen to reach different conclusions about the young and the old. On these and innumerable other issues, the conclusions reached by each are entailed as corollaries of their underlying assumptions about knowledge and wisdom. The education of the young has long been a battleground between adherents of the two visions of the nature of human beings and the nature of knowledge and wisdom. William Godwin’s notion that the young “are a sort of raw material put into our hands” remains, after two centuries, a powerful temptation to classroom indoctrination in schools and colleges. In the early twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson wrote of his years as an academic administrator when he felt “I should like to make the young gentlemen of the rising generation as unlike their fathers as possible.”52 #63 | | |
This indoctrination can start as early as elementary school, where students are encouraged or required to write about controversial issues, sometimes in letters to public officials. More fundamentally, the indoctrination process habituates them to taking sides on weighty and complex issues after hearing just one side of those issues. Moreover, they are habituated to venting their emotions instead of analyzing conflicting evidence and dissecting conflicting arguments. In short, they are led to prepackaged conclusions, instead of being equipped with the intellectual tools to reach their own conclusions, including conclusions different from those of their teachers. In many colleges and universities, whole academic departments are devoted to particular prepackaged conclusions—whether on race, the environment or other subjects, under such names as black, women’s or environmental “studies.” Few, if any, of these “studies” include conflicting visions and conflicting evidence, as educational rather than ideological criteria might require. #64 | | |
Critics of ideological indoctrination in schools and colleges often attack the particular ideological conclusions, but that is beside the point educationally. Even if we were to assume, for the sake of argument, that all the conclusions reached by all the various “studies” are both logically and factually valid, that still does not get to the heart of the educational issue. Even if students were to leave these “studies” with 100 percent correct conclusions about issues A, B and C, that would in no way equip them intellectually with the tools needed to confront very different issues X, Y and Z that are likely to arise over the course of their future years. For that they would need knowledge and experience in how to analyze and weigh conflicting viewpoints. As John Stuart Mill said: #65 | | |
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that... Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form. . .53 #66 | | |
One of the remarkable self-indulgences of contemporary educators in the public schools has been the introduction into classrooms of programs which systematically undermine moral principles that have come down over the centuries, and which children have been taught by their parents. These programs have usually been developed by intellectuals outside the field of education, extensively marketed by both commercial firms and non-profit organizations, and are often eagerly embraced by educators who have been taught in schools of education that their role is to be that of agents of social “change,” not simply transmitters of a heritage of knowledge. These programs have a remarkable variety of names and ostensible goals, one of the earliest names being “values clarification,” though other names have proliferated after parents and others discovered what “values clarification” really meant in practice and raised objections. #67 | | |
The phrase “values clarification” is very misleading. When parents tell their children not to steal or lie, or engage in violence, there is no ambiguity as to what they mean. Ambiguity is introduced by programs which confront students with carefully crafted moral dilemmas, such as a situation where a ship is sinking and there are more people than the lifeboats can hold, so that decisions have to be made as to who is to be left to drown, perhaps beaten off when they try to climb out of the water onto a lifeboat that is already so full that it will capsize if another person climbs in. Because received moral principles do not always apply, the implication is that each individual should develop his or her own situational ethics to replace traditional morality—not only where traditional moral principles fail but in the vast range of more ordinary situations where there are no such dilemmas as those in contrived examples. #68 | | |
If such exercises seem remote from the purposes of a public school education, they are not remote from the philosophy introduced into education by John Dewey a century ago and promoted by schools of education to the present day. Nor were they remote from the thinking by Woodrow Wilson. Like so much in the vision of the anointed, this view of education exalts those who believe in it, and so it is not simply a set of testable hypotheses about social events. Also like other aspects of that vision, there is no price to be paid by its promoters for being wrong, however large a price ends up being paid by individual students or by society at large. #69 | | |
“Values clarification” has been just one of a wide range of high-sounding names for classroom programs to re-shape the attitudes and consciousness of the younger generation. Other names have included “affective education,” “decision-making,” “Quest,” “sex education” and many other imaginative titles. Such titles are often simply flags of convenience, under which schools set sail on an “exciting” voyage in an uncharted sea of social experimentation in the re-shaping of young people’s beliefs and attitudes. The ever-changing names for these programs reflect the need for concealment or misdirection, since few parents want to be told that schools are out to undo what the parents have taught their children or to mold those children to be what third parties want them to be. #70 | | |
Enigmatic writing is another way of concealing what is being done. Many people—including many who have respected and agreed with his conclusions—have commented on the difficulty of trying to understand the writings of philosopher John Dewey who, in addition to his other roles, was the leading educational theorist of the twentieth century. William James, a contemporary and fellow leader in the development of the philosophy of pragmatism, called Dewey’s writing style “damnable.” In a later era, Richard Hofstadter said of Dewey, “He wrote a prose of terrible vagueness and plasticity.”54 Yet anyone who reads Dewey’s 1935 book Liberalism and Social Action will find its writing clear as a bell, whatever its merits or demerits otherwise. Nor can the subject matter of technical philosophy be the sole reason for the difficulties of trying to pin down what Dewey was saying in most of his earlier writings. Even books by Dewey with such a familiar and non-technical subject matter as The Child and the Curriculum have a vagueness that sometimes makes trying to grasp his meanings seem like trying to grab a handful of fog. #71 | | |
What Hofstadter regarded as a defect of Dewey’s writings on education—that a “variety of schools of educational thought have been able to read their own meanings into his writings”55—has been a source of the enduring influence of those writings. Moreover, it was a protective obscurity, since Dewey espoused ideas that could have set off more than one hornet’s nest of opposition if expressed in plain words in the early twentieth century. By 1935, when Liberalism and Social Action was published, the kinds of social and political notions expressed in that book were very much in keeping with the spirit of the 1930s and required no camouflage. #72 | | |
Writing in the early twentieth century, however, Dewey’s notion that education should be a means to “eliminate obvious social evils” through its “development of children and youth but also of the future society of which they will be the constituents”56 was a fundamental change in the role of schools. The notion that the school should be run as a microcosm of society—“a miniature community, an embryonic society”57—and as a place for conditioning students to want a very different kind of society, unlike the current society, was not something likely to find approval or perhaps even toleration. In the early twentieth century especially, parents were not sending their children to school to become guinea pigs in someone else’s social experiments to use education as a means of subverting existing values in order to create a new society based on new values, those of a self-anointed elite, more or less behind the backs of parents, voters and taxpayers. #73 | | |
