The only reference to public schools in DSA’s Workers Deserve More program is a line pledging “free quality public education,” without explaining what “quality” might mean. At a time when MAGA is spreading reactionary ideas of what young people should learn, DSA needs to pay much more attention to this issue.
Workers Deserve More calls for “a real democracy” in a “new political system” and “democratic control” of the economy. This assumes the American people are well-versed in the democratic ideals, values, and practices needed to actively and intelligently participate in such a society. Today this is obviously not the case. Maintaining a democratic socialist society will require a citizenry with a democratic socialist consciousness. The institutions most likely to build that consciousness, at least for the next generations, are public schools. It’s time for DSA to develop thoughtful, detailed proposals for how to restructure — indeed, revolutionize — the public education system to produce a generation of young people prepared to make all this democracy work.
Fortunately, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We just need to go back to the future and take a new look at the largely forgotten, misunderstood, and politically suppressed revolutionary pedagogy of the early twentieth-century progressive education movement. The movement’s founding father was the renowned educator John Dewey (1859–1952), a democratic socialist. His classic work, Democracy and Education, first published in 1916, laid out the principles of progressive education.
Dewey envisioned schools not as places set apart to learn lessons, but as laboratories of democracy, with the curriculum organized entirely around democratic values. He advocated making the outside community a classroom. Education would no longer be rote instruction of academic subjects. Instead, teachers would connect it to students’ life experiences in their home communities as a foundation for learning basic skills, and a basis for actively exploring and understanding the world around them.
Discussion and debate would be classroom practice. Students would be encouraged to question and challenge, and to advance their own suggestions about how to examine and test what they were studying, inside and outside the classroom. This would ultimately empower students and give them a sense of collective responsibility and personal involvement in the life of the school. They would work together to develop their abilities and talents and to understand they had the right and responsibility to apply what they learned to change conditions around them for the better.
Dewey and his daughter had previously published an illustrated book, The Schools of To-Morrow [sic], that described what the school curriculum should look like if the goal was education for life in a democratic society. The Deweys rejected focusing on the “Three R’s” and dividing the curriculum into separate academic subjects. They approvingly presented an example from what they called an “experiment” in Fairhope, Alaska: The usual curriculum was to be replaced with “physical exercise, nature study, music, hand work, field geography, storytelling, sense culture, fundamental conceptions of numbers, dramatization, and games.” Out of this would come, in its own time, knowledge of those “three R’s.” The charming pictures in this book depict students working in groups at all kinds of hands-on activities inside and outside the classroom, including building their own school, thereby creating a direct connection between their studies and the real life of the community.
This approach required a rethinking of theories of how children learn. Boyd H. Bode (1873-1953), a professor of education at Ohio State University and a disciple of Dewey (and a clearer, more readable writer), discussed this in several books, including How We Learn (1940). After presenting sophisticated critiques of dominant approaches to learning, he proposed instead what he called “pragmatic education,” which would establish student experience as the basis for learning. The task of the school, he said, is “to modify or ‘reconstruct’ the background of experience which the pupil brings with him … our chief reliance in this connection is on thinking.” The point would be to help students navigate new experiences in real life. Education becomes dynamic rather than static.
To Bode, democracy was a matter of cooperation, respect, and mutual understanding among divergent groups to achieve a better social order. So then “the task of democratic schools is to develop individual capacity with a specific reference … to the issue of democracy as a way of life. The life of the school should embody this .., the school is a form of social living, in which every pupil has both rights and responsibilities … it is precisely this spirit of democracy for which the schools must assume specific responsibility — in the organization of school life, in community relations, and in the promotion of insight or understanding of the meaning of democracy.”
