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.”
A group of progressive educators in the 1930s known as “social reconstructionists” took this even further, arguing that public schools should become the institutional and educational foundation for advancing political change. Progressive educator, sociologist, and political activist George S. Counts became its most prominent spokesman. He argued that progressive education could not be neutral on questions of social and economic justice. He told teachers to use their power to transmit progressive ideas, even to the point of what critics called indoctrination. Counts’s point of view was widely debated but did not have a lasting influence. Interestingly, in the late 1920s he toured the Soviet Union and was impressed with its accomplishments. Later, he changed course, and as president of the American Federation of Teachers he expelled Communist-led locals from the organization.
Unfortunately, progressive educators avoided any direct discussion about racial discrimination and school segregation. They also tended to adjust curricula according to the prevailing biases about gender preferences. But this is by no means a fatal flaw. Indeed, I believe that the philosophy and methods of progressive education provide the perfect formula for ending the social divisiveness and political alienation plaguing America and building a collective radical consciousness among the youngest generations.
Practical examples of this abound in Learning the Ways of Democracy: A Case Book in Civic Education, a 478-page volume published in 1940 by the Educational Policies Committee of the National Education Association. A veritable textbook of hundreds of actual practices in schools across the country, it is long out of print but available online at Hathitrust.org. Full understanding requires a thorough reading, but the book’s themes give an idea of the approach. In the eighty-page section entitled “The Course of Study,” the curriculum is composed entirely of civic education. The section headings are: the meaning of democracy, civil liberties, the dignity and worth of the individual, economic trends and problems, and political institutions and processes. The book includes seventy pages of examples of “School Activities in the Community” which describe all kinds of civic affairs and improvements. The book highlights direct student and teacher participation in school administration. In this volume, theory becomes practice, and practice comes to life.
By the 1940s, the movement, at least as Dewey envisioned it, was on its way out. His vision proved too difficult or laborious for many teachers to implement. Educators began to focus almost exclusively on the “child-centered” part of the program, in line with the ideas of Dewey’s colleague William Heard Kilpatrick (1871–1965). His “project method” placed responsibility for learning almost entirely on what the child decided to do, rejecting all fixed subjects in the standard curriculum. As he put it, “Such words as learn, teach, study, subject-matter, curriculum, promotion, textbook, objectives, norms … generally imply the static outlook” prevailing in schools at the time. The teacher would be merely a facilitator rather than an organizer or instructor: “As teachers we must make ourselves progressively unnecessary.”
Dewey challenged this in his 1938 book Experience and Education, arguing for a structured approach requiring teachers to take the lead in designing and organizing student experiences. That did not stop the trend towards putting the students in charge.
On top of this, the onset of World War II diverted public attention to the need to win the war, and towards that goal necessarily emphasized patriotic unity in the effort to defeat the global threat of fascism. The final blows that crushed progressive education were delivered during the Cold War anti-Communist hysteria of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Senator Joseph McCarthy, along with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), lost no time in putting progressive educators in their investigatory crosshairs. It became professionally risky for them to publicly promote or implement their “subversive” programs, and many lost their jobs. Of course, we see echoes of that today under the current administration in Washington.
The 1960s were a decade of “liberation” that provided appreciative audiences — mostly white and upper middle class —for even more extreme versions of child-centeredness. “Free schools,” inspired by A.S. Neill’s 1960 book Summerhill, erased even the remnants of teacher guidance. Children could follow whatever impulse they felt in choosing activities, as long as these didn’t impinge on the rights of other children. This fad of pedagogical anarchy mostly did not outlast the decade. But unfortunately it distorted public understanding of what progressive schools were originally supposed to be.
The rest is history. Fifty years of state and federal standardization of curriculum, mandatory testing, the belief that technology itself, apart from human intervention, determines the social and economic direction of society (need I say AI?), and “reforms” based on applying the principles of the capitalist market system (such as “choice”) have tossed the democratic ideals of progressive education down a memory hole.
The relative ease with which the current administration has undermined what are supposedly traditional democratic values and practices speaks poorly of the American people’s commitment to defending them consistently and effectively. Reversing that condition, much less transforming it, will be a difficult struggle. That has to begin in the public education system, and democratic socialists should take the lead. The instructions, so to speak, were written long ago and merely need to be revived and updated. Otherwise, a society in which the guiding slogan is “workers deserve more” can never be a reality.
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