An
Everlasting Faith
Fabianism was a principal force and
inspiration behind all major school legislation of the first half of the twentieth century.
And it will doubtless continue to be in the twenty- first. It will help us understand Fabian
influence
to look at the first Fabian-authored consideration of public schooling, the most talked-about
education book of 1900, Thomas
Davidson's peculiar and fantastic History of Education.
The Dictionary of
American Biography describes Davidson as a naturalized Scot, American since 1867, and a follower of
William Torrey Harris, federal Commissioner of Education — the most influential Hegelian in North America.
Davidson was also first president
of the Fabian Society in England, a fact not thought worthy of preservation
in the biographical dictionary,
but otherwise easy enough to confirm. This news is also absent from Pelling's America and The
British Left, although Davidson is credited there with "usurping" the Fabians.
In his important monograph
"Education in the Forming of American Society," Bernard Bailyn, as you'll recall, said anyone
bold enough to venture a history of American schooling would have to explain the sharp disjunction
separating these local institutions
as they existed from 1620 to 1890 from the massification which followed
afterwards. In presenting his
case, Bailyn had cause to compare "two notable books" on the
subject which both appeared in
1900. One was Davidson's, the other Edward Eggleston's.
Eggleston's Transit
of Civilization Bailyn calls "a remarkably imaginative effort to analyze the original investment from
which has developed Anglo-Saxon culture in America by probing the complex states of knowing and
thinking, of feeling and passion
of the seventeenth century colonists." The opening words of
Eggleston's book, said Bailyn,
make clear the central position of education in early America. Bailyn
calls Transit "one of the
subtlest and most original books ever written on the subject" and
"a seminal work," but he
notes how quickly it was "laid aside by American intelligentsia as an oddity, irrelevant to the interests
of the group then firmly shaping the historical study of American education."
For that group, the
book of books was Davidson's History of Education. William James called its author a "knight-errant
of the intellectual life," an "exuberant polymath." Bailyn agrees that Davidson's "was a
remarkable book":
Davidson starts with "The Rise of
Intelligence" when "man first rose above the brute." Then he trots briskly through
"ancient Turanian," Semitic, and Aryan education, picks up speed on "civic education" in
Judaea, Greece, and Rome, gallops swiftly across Hellenistic, Alexandrian, Patristic, and Muslim education;
leaps magnificently over the
thorny barriers of scholasticism, the mediaeval universities,
Renaissance, Reformation, and
Counter-Reformation, and then plunges wildly through the remaining five
centuries in sixty- four pages
flat.
It was less the
frantic scope than the purpose of this strange philosophical essay that distinguished it in the eyes of an
influential group of writers. Its purpose was to dignify a newly self-conscious profession called
Education. Its argument, a heady distillation of conclusions from Social Darwinism, claimed that modern
education was a cosmic force
leading mankind to full realization of itself. Davidson's preface puts
the intellectual core of Fabianism
on center stage:
My endeavor has been
to present education as the last and highest form of evolution.... By placing education in relation to the
whole process of evolution, as its highest form, I have hoped to impart to it a dignity which it could hardly
otherwise receive or claim... when
it is recognized to be the highest phase of the world-process. "World process" here is an echo of Kant
and Hegel, and for the teacher to be the chief agent in that process, both it and he assumes a
very different aspect.
Here is the intellectual and emotional
antecedent of "creation spirituality," Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's assertion that evolution
has become a spiritual inevitability in our time. Suddenly mere schooling found itself elevated from its
petty, despised position on the
periphery of the known universe into an intimate involvement in the cosmic
destiny of man, a master key too
important to be left to parents. By 1906, Paul Monroe of Teachers College could write in his Text-book in
the History of Education that knowledge of the "purpose of education" was to supply the teacher
with "fundamentals of an everlasting
faith as broad as human nature and as deep as the life of the
race."
This History of
Education, according to Bailyn, "came to be taught as an introductory course, a form of initiation, in every
normal school, department of education, and teachers college in the country":
The story had to be
got straight. And so a few of the more imaginative of that energetic and able group of men concerned with
mapping overall progress of "scientific" education, though not otherwise historians, took
over the management of the historical work in education. With great virtuosity they drew up what became
the patristic literature of a
powerful academic ecclesia. The official history of education: grew in almost total isolation
from the major influences and shaping minds of twentieth- century historiography; and its isolation
proved to be self-intensifying: the more
parochial the subject became, the less capable it was of attracting the
kinds of scholars who could give
it broad relevance and bring it back into the public domain. It soon displayed the exaggeration of weakness
and extravagance of emphasis that are the typical results of sustained inbreeding.
These
"educational missionaries" spoke of schools as if they were
monasteries. By limiting the idea
of education to formal school instruction, the public gradually lost sight of what the real thing was. The
questions these specialists disputed were as irrelevant to real people as the disputes of medieval
divines; there was about their writing a
condescension for public concerns, for them "the whole range of
education had become an instrument
of deliberate social purpose." (emphasis added) After 1910,
divergence between what various
publics expected would happen, in government schools and what the rapidly expanding school
establishment intended to make happen opened a deep gulf between home and school, ordinary
citizen and policymaker.
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