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milo f. McDonald



Copyright, 1952

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milo f. McDonald

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America



AMERICAN EDUCATION:

THE OLD, THE MODERN AND THE “NEW”

By

MILO F. McDonald, Ph.D., Litt.D.

American Education Association

New York



INTRODUCTION

This booklet has been written to present in compact form the essential

facts connected with the development of those unfortunate tendencies which

characterize our present day American public schools. We are of the opinion
that the steady demand that there has been and still is for “Progressive”

Poison in Public Education, the booklet we published last year, shows the

American public to be genuinely interested in the public school systems of

the several states and in the atheistic influences, with socialistic objectives,

which are steadily undermining them. Professional school people and parents

of children attending the public schools are desirous of ascertaining how the

presently deplorable situation was conceived, who originated it and who is

currently supporting it. For the purpose of answering these questions, in

relatively brief form, this booklet was brought into existence. We hope it
fills a present need. We hope it will promote a clearer understanding of the
activities of those who are endeavoring to build a new social order in the

United States of America, through the schools, as was done in Russia between

1917 and 1933.

The challenge is real. The enemies of our schools are to be found in

the ranks of the “Progressives”, the leadership of the National Education

Association and the founders of the John Dewey Society who, with their

followers have, for many years, been endeavoring to gain control over American

education. They are endeavoring to change the whole social and political

structure of our country by means of an educational program in our schools

and the doctrine of the “freedom of self-expression”. The unfortunate fact

is that they have been to date notoriously successful. Their path has, how-

ever, within the past decade been beset by obstacles. These obstacles have

been placed in the path of the Socialists in education by many men and

women, throughout our country, who fully realize the goal the sponsors of

the “new” American education seek to attain and are determined to prevent

them.

The Social Frontiersmen of the “new” education, the leadership of the

National Education Association and the “leftists” of both communistic and

socialistic character, who are identical in all but the tactics they employ, now

realize that their opponents are resolved to stop the further progress of

“progressive” education in this country. So the true enemies of American

education are now following the Soviet strategy and calling, in magazine

articles, on platforms and over radio and television systems those who are

opposing the further spread of anti-American doctrines in our public schools:

“enemies of public education”.

So the battle is joined. Last year we published
“
‘Progressive* Poison in

Public Education” in an effort to clarify the issues involved. We were heart-
ened by the reception accorded it. Now we present “American Education —

The Old, The Modern and The ‘New’.” Our aim is to portray the history of

“progressive” education, to show how old many of its cliches are, to indicate

clearly how the “new” education which its supporters would fasten upon the

public school systems of this country is in its history identified with those

whose main hope is to destroy the United States of America which they regard

as the last defense of Western civilization and in the process, Christianity upon

which that civilization is founded. That hope is, of course, ultimately doomed

to disappointment but in the meantime those now in our schools are in grave

moral danger by reason of the type of education being offered and the dis-

honest practices being fostered by it. We are enemies of “Progressives”. We
hope our ranks may be swelled by others who will interest themselves in the

“new” education, its origins and its objectives. In the hope that we may

gain their interest this booklet has been written.

milo f. McDonald
June 1, 1952



American Education: The Old, The Modern

and The “New”

The Old American Education

With the exception of Georgia all the American colonies were es-

tablished during the seventeenth century. They were for the most part

English in origin and with the exception of Maryland were constituted

of adherents of Protestantism. The early settlers in Maryland were Cath-

olic. Practically all the people who came to the New World from Europe

were Christians. These essential facts account for the type of educational

effort that was made in the early days of our country.

European Influences

The type of education that was established in the New World

tended to pattern itself after the seventeenth century European model.

England was famous for her many universities, her Latin schools and

her academies. In the New World similar institutions arose in the life

of each colony — some in the early life and some in the Revolution-

ary War period. All these institutions were characterized by religious

atmospheres and practices. All were privately supported. Most were

able to carry on by reason of philanthropic endowments. All were in-

tended for the sons of those colonists who were in better financial cir-

cumstances. The colleges established in America were divinity schools.

They existed for the purpose of preparing young men for the Christian

ministry. Many young men of wealthy families were sent to England

for their collegiate education.

In addition there were in America in colonial times dame schools.

These were numerous particularly in New England and New York.

These dame schools were for the younger children. The instruction was

all tutorial, the teachers were not especially well prepared and came

from the ranks of the town spinsters and soldiers who had returned

wounded from their participation in conflicts with the Indians. In these

dame schools tuition was charged. It is true, however, that schools

1



Page Two AMERICAN EDUCATION:

also existed for the poorer children. These charity schools, as they were

called, were not public institutions but were supported by organized

philanthropic groups interested in the education of the poor. Except

for elementary education, that is, except for the work done by the dame

and the charity schools, which accommodated both sexes, no provision

was made for the education of girls.

All the schools were under church control and religious instruction
.

constituted a most important part of their work. Ethical ideals were

also an essential part of the curriculum in all colonial schools. The

religious strains and stresses in the mother country strengthened the

belief among the colonists that the religious note should permeate all

school work. The too frequent unfortunate result, as we know from our

study of history, was to fasten upon the New World the misunderstand-

ings, prejudices and hates of seventeenth century Europe. Yet the colon-

ists had knowingly migrated, it is true, to a land of opportunity, but

also to one of danger and of struggle. They had done so, in large part,

so that they might preserve their religious beliefs and practices. While

we cannot commend or approve the bigotry and narrow-mindedness

that followed their insistence upon their sectarian biases, we can under-

stand the reason for them. Colonial America became in accordance with

their inherited beliefs ardently Christian and vigorously Protestant. This

Protestant Christianity was reflected by the schools they established in

all the colonies, with the exception of Maryland, which, in its early

days, as we have said, was Catholic.

Maryland had been established in 1634 by Leonard Calvert, second

son of George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, at whose request the

charter granting him proprietary rights was granted by his friend, King

Charles I, of England. It was in Maryland, says Bancroft, that “Religious

liberty obtained a home, its only home in the wide world.” The pur-

pose of the first Lord Baltimore in founding the colony of Maryland

was to establish in the New World a refuge for Irish families of the

Catholic faith who had been dispossessed from their homeland, the

County of Ulster, in Ireland, by the action of the English government

to make room for Scotch immigrants. Through the practical Christianity

of the proprietor and the subsequent ratification of his recommenda-

tion by the Maryland assembly in 1649 freedom of religious worship

was granted to all Christians in the colony. The famous “Toleration

Act” of Maryland read:



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Three

“That no person or persons professing to believe in Jesus Christ,

shall from henceforth be any ways troubled, molested or discountenanced

for or in respect of his or her religion”

The Toleration Act of Maryland was in strong contrast, it must

and is generally admitted to be, with the lack of consideration shown

in the other colonies of Christians for Christians whose theological con-

cepts differed from theirs. As a matter of fact the tolerance exhibited

by the people of Maryland became in brief time the means of their

undoing. When in the year following the promulgation of the Toleration

Act the Puritans of Virginia who wished to settle elsewhere because of

the intolerance shown to them by their present neighbors, petitioned for

the right of settlement in Maryland, permission was granted to them.

They founded a settlement at Providence, the site of the present city of

Annapolis. It was not long, however, before the Catholic founders of

Maryland suffered at the hands of those to whom they had shown toler-

ance. The Puritans who had come from Virginia, with the aid of others

of their faith within the colony, seized the government of Maryland

and repealed the Toleration Act. In 1658, when the authority of Lord

Baltimore was re-established, the act was restored to the statute books

and tolerance once again became a governing principle in the colony.

At the time of the Protestant Revolution, upon the accession of William

and Mary to the throne of England, the Toleration Act was again re-

pealed. It was not until the American Revolution became imminent and

unity against England imperative, that Catholics were treated with tol-

erance in a colony which they themselves had established upon exceed-

ingly tolerant principles.

We have elaborated upon the history of the colony of Maryland
because the lessons taught by that history need emphasis today. For

that reason we shall refer to them when we consider the “new” educa-

tion. As a result of the campaign initiated in Maryland by the Puritans

who had found Virginia distasteful to them and had sought and found

asylum within the Catholic colony, the original settlers of Maryland

and their children lost the rights which the New World had, for a brief

time, given them. In Maryland Catholics were subsequently denied

admission to the higher institutions of learning which had been estab-

lished in the colony. They were forced to provide their own higher

schools. Under the leadership of the Jesuits they did this in 1745 by

the establishment of a classical academy at Bohemia Manor.



Page Four AMERICAN EDUCATION:

Uniformity

The organization of educational facilities was similar throughout

all that part of colonial America which came to form, in time, the United

States. In the rural areas, in the North and uniformly throughout the

South the growth of a public school system was slow. It was not until

1821 for instance that the first public high school was established in

Massachusetts, the state which during its colonial history had paid most

attention to the formal education of the young. In 1827 Massachusetts

provided by legislative enactment that every town of five hundred

families should maintain a public high school.

In the matter bf the content of education and the methods of teach-

ing employed in the schools throughout the colonial period and extend-

ing far into the young life of the new republic there was relative uni-

formity. The content in the elementary schools embraced the funda-

mentals of reading, writing and arithmetic through fractions. In the

higher schools the classical studies dominated. The method of teaching

was largely that of “backing the book” as it was called and reciting,

that is, telling the teacher what had been memorized from the pages

of the text-book. As a matter of fact this method prevailed until approxi-

mately the closing quarter of the nineteenth century and to a limited

extent even thereafter. In 1925 the writer in a visit to the United States

Military Academy at West Point saw this method in use. The socialized

lesson constitutes one of the elements, as we shall attempt to indicate

later, which differentiates modern American education from the old with

which we are presently concerned.

The moral training which should eventuate as a result of education

was stressed in the early schools of this country both during the colonial

period and extending far into our history as a united nation. It was

discernible in the period when schools were under private or church

control and was insisted upon when public systems of schools were

organized. Religious values were considered of great merit and there

was insistence upon their preservation. This insistence led to difficul-

ties in the organization and administration of all tax supported schools.

The most notable of these difficulties occurred in Massachusetts and in

the City of New York.



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Five

Massachusetts

In Massachusetts during the eighteen forties interest in the public

schools and their conduct was strong. As we have indicated, in the

schools of the country and particularly in New England there was a strong

religious note. It was what they considered an attack upon this tradition

coupled with the announced campaign of the new secretary of the State

Board of Education, Horace Mann, that caused the educational unrest

in the forties. There was in Massachusetts strong religious denomin-

ational feelings. Sectarian bias and bigotry were loudly voiced and

defended. The Secretary of the State Board of Education was himself

a most tolerant man but the past history of Massachusetts and of the

other states as well had built up among the people, aided in the forties

by clergymen and by the religious press of the period, fixed, standard-

ized re-actions to the reforms attempted by Horace Mann. The fact

that the forties were the years of the great immigration of Irish Catholics

to America intensified the opposition. Prior to this time there had been

strong disagreement among the different Protestant sects but they did

not approach the resentment and bigotry that manifested itself at the

flood of Irishmen who came to the New World and who in large num-

bers went into the mills of Massachusetts during the fifth decade of

the nineteenth century. The early history of the relatively new republic

was the result of the work, as expressed at the time, of English Protes-

tantism. Through her schools, however, thought the majority of the

people of Massachusetts and of the other states as well, Protestantism

was to be kept in the ascendancy. Horace Mann’s reforms, to their think-

ing, threatened this ascendancy. The fact that the vast majority of

those coming into Massachusetts at the time as immigrants to the new

world of North America, whose government promised freedom from

oppression were, as we have said, Irish and Catholic, did not help the

situation.

Horace Mann was a man of deeply religious tendencies. His family

ties were all strictly Calvinistic affinities. To him, however, the con-

tinuance of the spirit of sectarianism in the schools meant the defeat

of any prospect of victory in his efforts to establish a system of schools

under state control. It was his desire to break the control which re-

ligious groups and charitable organizations held over education in

Massachusetts. If schools were to come under state control then public

funds, so announced Mann, must no longer be given to sectarian groups.



Page Six AMERICAN EDUCATION:

If the stigma of charity was to be removed from the elementary schools

of Massachusetts then public funds, accumulated as a result of taxes im-

posed upon all the people, must be under the control of representatives

of all the people and not of special church groups. Moreover, said Mann,

in many of the addresses he delivered throughout Massachusetts, in the

period we are considering, the whole purpose of the schools must be

changed. People must cease to look upon them as the perpetuators of

denominational creeds. Their aim must be the preparation of the young

people for a life of worthy citizenship. Civic responsibility should be-

come the watchword of the public schools, instead of denominational

loyalty.

It was true, as we have indicated, that the majority of the early

settlers in this country were English Protestants. It was likewise true

that a great many Irish Catholics had come to this country during the

colonial period. Many had settled in the South. In the Revolutionary

War Period Washington had occasion to thank Irish Catholics for their

patriotic defense of the country in which they had recently settled. Dur-

ing the third decade of the nineteenth century vast numbers of other

Irish Catholics left their motherland to seek their fortunes in the New

World. Many of these settled in New England. By reason of agricul-

tural conditions in Ireland and the difficulty of finding employment

there during the forties, Irish immigration to this country had increased

rapidly. It was this situation which added major difficulties to the

problem confronting them.

The cry raised against Mann was that his efforts would make the

American public school a Godless institution. There were many well-

intentioned Americans who believed in Mann’s program and saw in it

the only path by which the schools could be brought under public con-

trol who replied that if the abolition of sectarianism in the public schools

would make American public education Godless “then Godless let it be”.

It was not, however, until 1855 that Massachusetts provided by an

amendment to the State constitution for the establishment of the re-

forms which Horace Mann had initially proposed. In accordance with

the law as it was finally placed on the statute books the Bible was to be

read, without comment, in opening the day’s work in each public school

classroom. In the daily reading of the Bible and of the singing of the

Lord’s Prayer Mann had always believed. The formal teaching of either,

by reason of the intrinsic nature of the material presented in class.



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Seven

he contended, would introduce the accentuation of religious differences

and destroy all effort to foster public education. He wished, however,

the thought of God to be perpetuated in the schools in a manner similar

to the manner in which we, as a nation, have attempted to perpetuate

our dependence upon Him and to indicate our loyalty to Him by inscrib-

ing upon our coins “In God We Trust”. Mann was religious but neither

bigoted nor biased. This was shown throughout his career in Congress

to which he was elected to serve out the un-expired term of John Quincy

Adams who died in 1848. Mann made many friends among his former

enemies but not enough of them to win for him the governorship of Massa-

chusetts for which he was a candidate in 1853. Shortly thereafter he

accepted the presidency of Antioch College, at Yellow Springs, Ohio.

He died in 1859 and in his last public address spoke these words: “Be

ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity”.

The work of Horace Mann influenced the efforts to establish edu-

cation upon a public basis in other states. Not all people were con-

vinced, however, that Mann’s solution of the problem, the almost com-

plete secularization of the education of the young, was the correct one.

There were many people, Protestants and Catholics alike, who believed

that the proposals he was making were not adequate. They urged that

a way be found to achieve a solution of the problem connected with

the allotment of public funds for educational purposes so that those

who wished to follow Mann’s ideas of the almost complete seculariza-

tion of education might do so and that those who wished religious values

to permeate the education of their children should be permitted their

share of the public funds, for the purpose of realizing their aims. This

proposed solution of the problem seemed to them in strict conformity

with the thought of religious freedom for all its citizens which the United

States espoused. They agreed that Horace Mann was honest in his

effort to solve an exceedingly grave and fundamental problem but they

did not believe his solution to be the correct one.

New York

In the State of New York difficulties arose over the question of the

financial support of education. In this State, as in all others with the

exception of Massachusetts, at the time of which we are speaking, the

year 1824, there were no “public schools” as we understand the term

today. There were private schools in which tuition fees were paid and



Page Eight AMERICAN EDUCATION:

"charity schools,” that is schools for the education of the children from

the poorer families. In the City of New York in November, 1824, there

was established by State law a provision that required the Common

Council of the City to govern money to be appropriated by the State

Legislature for the support of schools and to designate "the institutions

or schools which should be entitled to receive such school moneys”.

As early as 1805 the original fund had been created and by legislative

enactment it had been increased several times. In 1824 discrepancies

in the financial accounts of the governing agencies were revealed and

in consequence in that year it was proposed that a plan of requiring the

Common Council of the city to designate corporations to receive State

school funds be adopted. These corporations, when once nominated

by the Common Council, became directly responsible to the Secretary

of State to whom regularly they were to render accounts of their use of

State funds. The corporations designated by the Common Council in

accordance with the law which was enacted in 1824 were the Public

School Society and four religious institutions, two under Protestant and

two under Catholic control.

The Public School Society

The Public School Society was originally incorporated in 1805 as,

according to its charter "The Society for Establishing a Free School in

the City of New York, for the Education of such Poor Children as do

not belong to or are not provided for by any Religious Society”. In

1808 its charter was extended to all children who were in need of free

education and its name was changed to “The Free School Society of New

York”. In 1826 its name was again changed to "The Public School So-

ciety of New York” and its trustees were authorized to provide for the

education of all children in the City of New York who were not other-

wise provided for "whether such children were or were not the proper

subjects of gratuitous education”. Anyone could become a member of

the society by making a contribution to its funds. The members of the

Common Council by reason of their offices were also, according to the

law, members of the Society. The Trustees of the Public School Society

were one hundred in number. Fifty of the trustees were elected by the

total membership and those elected selected fifty additional trustees.

Between 1826 and 1840, the year in which the great challenge to

its work was made, the Public School Society had established nearly



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Nine

one hundred schools in the City of New York. In these schools were

taught the fundamentals of a purely secular education and in addition

those general principles of religion and morality common to all Christian

denominations. The trustees of the Society belonged in the main to the

various Protestant sects represented in the city. There were, however,

a few Catholics on the Board of Trustees.

Objections to the schools were raised by the Catholics whose chil-

dren attended them. They protested on the ground that religious teach-

ing should permeate all the education of the young since, so they con-

tended, there could be no genuine morality unless it were founded on

religion. To complete secularization of the schools they were opposed.

But, they contended, it was not true that religion was being taught

without sectarianism for said the most Reverend John Hughes, D.D.

Catholic Bishop, later Archbishop, of New York, who led the protest

of his people in the city: "If you exclude all sects, you exclude Christi-

anity. Take away the distinctive dogmas of the Catholics, the Baptists,

the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and soon you have nothing left but

deism.”

Bishop Hughes contended that sectarianism was being taught in

the schools. The version of the Bible that was read was objectionable

to Catholics. Moreover it was not read without comment but teachers

in the schools, by comments and explanations made, tended to destroy

the faith of Catholic children attending the schools.* The net result

was that religious equality, granted by the Constitution of the United

States, was being destroyed locally by the public schools in the City of

New York.

* The question of the Bible in the public school came to the fore again in 1844.
In that year the deputy-superintendent of public schools in the City of New York,
Dr. Reese, urged the adoption of a resolution by the Board of Education to compel

all public school teachers to read to the children a portion of the Bible daily. The
resolution provided that in those schools which had on register a preponderance

of Catholic children the Douay version of the Bible should be used. The Board
of Education would not consent to the compulsory use of any one version and denied

that the superintendent of schools had the right to make any such provision. A
long and heated discussion followed. Bishop Hughes though present at the meeting

remained silent throughout it. Dr. Reese, in the course of the meeting, denied em-

phatically that Dr. Hughes had at any time made any effort to exclude the Bible
from the public schools. The Bishop’s silence was attributable to the fact that by

reason of his past experiences he had no interest in promoting the purposes of

those who would make of the schools and of the religious question a controversial
political issue. He had long since determined that the only proper course was to
devote himself to the problems connected with the building up of a parochial school

system.



Page Ten AMERICAN EDUCATION:

In the city, at this time, there were estimated to be nearly twelve

thousand Catholic children. About five thousand attended parish schools

that had been established, usually in the basements of church buildings.

Only about three hundred Catholic children attended the public schools.

The remainder, more than half of the total number of Catholic children

in the city, received no formal education of any kind or in relatively

few instances attended private schools at which tuition was paid. The

situation was genuinely deplorable. The parochial schools were few in

number and those few were heavily overcrowded. The Catholics consti-

tuted relatively the larger part of the poor people in the city. It was

impossible for them to support their churches, contended the bishop,

and, at the same time attempt an extension on their present financial

means, of the parochial school system in the city. At this time there

was only one parish school building.

Bishop Hughes therefore asked that an adequate portion of the

State funds be assigned to the support of the parochial system of schools,

which after all was a truly American request, he added, since the United

States was a Christian country, with equality for all Christian denomi-

nations, and not specifically a Protestant country as the schools conducted

by the Public School Society in their patterns seemed to assume it was.

The result of this request, making a clear revelation of the issues involved,

stirred up strong opposition in the city.

Despite the opposition and the clamor there seemed to be evidence

in the spring of 1841 that the Legislature favored the suggested plan.

In a message to the Legislature, Governor Seward referred to the diffi-

culty and seemed disposed to settle it along the lines suggested by

Bishop Hughes. It was only just, however, contended some that before

action was taken by the State Legislature, the matter should be brought

before the Common Council of the city. Those who favored this plan

of action pleaded for it on the basis of the necessary preservation of

home rule.

Politics and the Schools

This suggestion seemed reasonable and was accepted. Actually it

was a political ruse. Education was a State matter then as it is now

and the question should have been referred to the Legislature as the

Governor in his message had suggested. There were those in the City



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW’ Page Eleven

of New York then, as there are now, who saw in the schools and in

school questions opportunity for political advantage. In consequence

the solidarity of the Catholics in the city, one-fifth of its total population,

was broken by ambitious and unprincipled partisans, many of them

Catholics, who for personal political advantage, for votes and for jobs,

disrupted the campaign for the use of public funds to support all

Christian schools whether they maintained a narrowly secular course

of study or one devoted to the idea that all formal education should be

permeated by religious values.

At the time of these happenings Dr. Hughes was in Europe. When

he returned on July 18, he immediately issued a call for action. On

July 20 a meeting was held and Bishop Hughes once again clearly out-

lined his position. He told those present at the meeting, at which his

assistant, Rev. Dr. Power presided, that there were certain essentials to

be kept in mind. These were:

1. The issue was a profoundly serious one.

2. The Church was in grave danger of becoming embroiled by

politicians in matters with which it had no concern and from

which it should hold itself aloof.

3. This was a matter of deep religious significance and he, the

Catholic bishop, would lead the campaign to gain a just settle-

ment of the issues involved. If politicians, however, with their

customary practices, were to enter into the discussion of the

question he would reluctantly be forced to desist.

Unfortunately politics did enter into the question. As a result of

the reference of the problem to the Common Council the following plan

of settlement of the issues raised was eventually proposed by a Com-

mittee of the Council:

1. That the Public School Society govern the administration of the

parochial school system.

2. That no religious doctrine be taught during the ordinary school

day.

3. That instruction in the Catholic religion be given at the end of

the school day but that in such instruction no reference be

made to other denominations or their teachings.



Page Twelve AMERICAN EDUCATION:

4. That State funds be allotted to the Catholic parochial schools

on the basis of the relationship the number of children in them

bore to the total number of children in the schools conducted

by the Public School Society.

The Common Council rejected the foregoing proposals which, as

a matter of fact, like most compromises, actually pleased neither side.

Bishop Hughes again took the lead in the controversy and as a result

of his recommendations a memorial was directed to the Legislature

asking for a State settlement of the educational problems in the City of

New York. In consequence Hon. John C. Spencer, Secretary of State

and by reason of his occupancy of that office, in accordance with State

law, superintendent of its public schools, made a report providing for

a complete change in the school system of the City of New York. The

report of the secretary made the following recommendations:

1. A commissioner of education should be elected in each ward

of the city. All the commissioners would constitute a City

Board of Education.

2. The general school laws of the State should be extended to all

public schools in the city.

3. All powers now held by the Public School Society should be

transferred to the commissioners.

4. All State public school money should be paid to the commis-

misioners and used by them for the support of the schools

under their jurisdiction.

To the recommendations the Public School Society strongly ob-

jected; though they presented no prospect of help for the Catholic

schools, yet Dr. Hughes approved because, to his mind, they meant the

end of the Public School Society. When, however, the recommendations

of the Secretary of State were sent to the Legislature for approval the

opposition became so strong that the legislators, fearing political con-

sequences, tabled the whole matter and said that to provide a cooling

off period and time to study at greater length the proposals of the Sec-

retary of State the question should go over until January, 1842. The

basic idea was that the question should be made an issue to be decided

by the election of November, 1841. It was not settled by this election,

however, and action was, thereby deferred until the following year.



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Thirteen

The results of deferring action on the Secretary of State’s school

plan was to make the election of 1842 in the City of New York probably

the stormiest in the local history of that area. Unfortunately Bishop

Hughes was, against his better judgment, drawn into the controversy.

During the campaign he was vilified by newspaper editorials and by the

type of practical politicians, both lay and clerical, in his own Church as

well as out of it, which the City of New York even to this day seems

to breed. He was, however, by nature of militant disposition. He fought

back with the result that even his own episcopal residence on Mulberry

street was attacked and rocks and bricks were thrown through its win-

dows. Fortunately the Bishop was not at home at the time.

Later Bishop Hughes regretted exceedingly the course of events

in the election campaign of 1842 because by reason of the trend that

had been establishd he had been placed among the advocates of the

tendency toward the growth of secularism in the publo schools. Though

within a short period of time after the election had been held and the

issues decided he took occasion to declare the whole system of “Godless

education”, as he described the pattern of thinking on the school ques-

tion which the election had established, radically unsound; still he could

even then see no other course of action he could have taken in the elec-

tion controversy than the one he had followed. At the same time he

had been drawn into politics, an event in the earlier years of the struggle

he feared might possibly happen but which he had consistently op-

posed and fought against. It was evident to him later, it seems, that

the politicians had maneuvered him into an insupportable position.

It was wrong to divorce the public schools almost entirely from all re-

ligious values. He later said it was apparent that the Catholics, as soon

as they were financially able to do so, must establish schools of their own.

When the Legislature convened in January 1843 the plan of the

Secretary of State was adopted and ward schools took the place of those

formerly controlled by the Public School Society. The Society, a few

years later, deeded over all its possessions to the city and quietly went

out of existence.

We have outlined in detail the whole question of public educa-

tion in Massachusetts and in the City of New York during the years

1840-42 because the issues debated so vehemently then are still with

us and in magnified form as we shall see later in our discussion of the

“new” education. Secularism in education has led to the prevalence of

atheistic influences in the public school systems of this country.



Page Fourteen AMERICAN EDUCATION:

Secularism

Secularism had gained a foothold in the public school systems of

all the states at the time of the Civil War. Throughout the country

the term public school system simply signified that public funds were

used for the support of schools in the systems. These were the tax-sup-

ported schools. There were other schools supported by private endow-

ments and by the payments of tuition. The public schools were con-

cerned with elementary education. Government of public education by

a local Boards of Education, such as was established by the Spencer

plan in the City of New York in 1842, became a general practice in the

period after the Civil War and is still the prevalent practice. In this

period, too, grew sustained interest in the establishment of public high

schools. In the earlier days such schools had been established in Massa-

chusetts. It is interesting to note that one of the public high schools,

that established in New York State, in the City of Brooklyn, was called

the Central Grammar School to overcome the opposition of the Common

Council which was opposed to using public funds for free secondary

schools. It was the belief of the Brooklyn Common Council that people

who wished to send their children to such schools should meet all ex-

penses incurred by such action. This was in 1879. How times have

changed. It is unfortunate that of late years a retrogressive movement,

though called Progressive, has been substituted for genuine progress.

This backward movement, this reversion to poorer concepts of educa-

tion along with better school buildings, is the outstanding characteristic

of the twentieth century. This characteristic we shall discuss later.

At this time we simply wish to add, and so bring to an end our

discussion of what we have called the old American education, the

thought that as we approached the nineties American education had

become almost entirely secular. It is true that in Massachusetts and

in New York, both of which States had secularized their schools,

and had provided by law that schools which included instruction in

any religious sectarian doctrine should not be entitled to the use of pub-

lic funds, the daily reading at the Bible without comment was con-

tinued. The singing of the Lord’s Prayer was also continued and in

some public schools still prevails. These practices have never been con-

sidered as constituting violation of State law since no instruction is

involved. The practices have, however, been languishing because of

tacit opposition in large urban centers, which now and then becomes



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Fifteen

articulate and at times constitutes the basis of letters to the press. The

secularization of the public school systems of America, however, was

practically complete at about the time the twentieth century began.

It should be observed that throughout the West, in the region of

our country that is made up of States that have entered the Union since

the Civil War, public education has always been secularized. The

struggle that centered around the problem of retaining religious values

in public education was an Eastern problem. It was a struggle that

had, to the minds of many people, an unfortunate ending. It could have

been settled differently but the fact remains that it was not. Perhaps

so far as Catholics are concerned it could not have been settled differ-

ently for after all the fact that the early settlers in practically all the

colonial divisions of North America were English Protestants and that

the settlements followed closely the age of the Reformation determined

the school pattern. So the necessity for the Catholic parochial school

system and the Lutheran parochial school system as well, is a logical

conclusion of the conditions of the seventeenth century. What is not

logical and what is more inexplicable is the fact that in this, the twen-

tieth century, we have prevalent in the public school systems in the

United States a condition that is not really non-religious but actually

atheistic. This condition under the guise of introducing the “new”

education and under the slogan of “academic freedom” is introducing

an anti-religious atmosphere into education and an atheistic curriculum

into our schools which is far removed from the purposes for which the

United States of America was established and altogether dissimilar

to the practices we have always understood to be the distinguishing

characteristics of Western Christian civilization.

We do not, however, wish to get ahead of our story, so we shall

turn now to what we have termed the period of modern education in

America. We shall trace its origins in Europe and pay brief attention

to those reformers who helped to shape not only our modern educa-

tion but also the beginning of that movement which has culminated

in our “new” education of “Progressive” design which threatens us and

promises to destroy our nation and the confidence many have vested

in it as “the last hope of Western Christian civilization.”



- Page Sixteen AMERICAN EDUCATION:

The Modern American Education

The period between 1875 and 1900 represents roughly the time

during which American education may be said to have been modernized.

It was throughout the years comprising the last quarter of the nineteenth

century that the educational theories of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

(1746-1827), Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) and Friedrich Wil-

helm Froebel (1782-1852) found their way into the practices of our

American schools. The European influences upon American education

which came from the work of Pestalozzi, Herbart and Froebel are most

interesting to follow in their European origins and in the effects which

they produced in the United States of America.

Rousseau and Pestalozzi

The first of the European educators to influence our American

schools was Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Pestalozzi was a German hav-

ing been born in the old city of Zurich. His interest in education came

from his study of one of the most provocative books of the eighteenth

century, the “Emile” of Jean Jacques Rousseau. “Emile” was written

in 1726. In that same year Rousseau published another book which also

had a profound influence — “The Social Contract”. This most impractical

and unreliable French theorist produced two books from which revolu-

tions stemmed. “Emile” is basically responsible for the major revolution-

ary changes that took place at first in Europe and later to a greater

extent in the United States of America in the field of educational theory

and practice. “The Social Contract,” with its emphasis upon the necessity

for the establishment of a democratic government based upon the “lib-

erty, fraternity and equality” of men and the destruction of tyranny

on the part of both churchmen and politicians, became the basis and the

guide of the French Revolution.

While Rousseau was most persuasive in his writing both in the field

of education and in that of government, his personal life was a denial of

everything he wrote. Still his influence was most fundamental. It affected

not only his own time, but still is basic to the thinking of many people

even in this twentieth century, in both the fields of education and of



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Seventeen

politics. It affects the thinking of many who have studied him and his

writings, and of millions more who, in all probability, have never heard

of him or of his books.

Pestalozzi lived through the period when Rousseau's influence pre-

dominated. It determined his life. Pestalozzi’s experiments in the field

of education were initiated at a school for abandoned children which he

established on his farm at Neuhof. This school failed after two years of

weary effort. Pestalozzi’s idea at Neuhof was to direct children, the

children of the poorest of the poor, toward a moral life based upon a

desire to be economically independent. It was his thought that in the

“natural” life that Rousseau stressed, the desire “to do” on the part of

children was evident. Pestalozzi had a vision of the amelioration of

bad living conditions through the application of the creative energies

of youth to the varying pursuits radiating from farm experiences. He

sought to unite the educational theories of Rousseau as outlined so

enticingly in “Emile” with the results so charmingly portrayed by the

inspirationalists of the French Revolution to be achieved by society in

general if it were but to follow the counsels given in “The Social Con-

tract”. That Rousseau was but a clever intriguer who could write most

persuasively and perform most disappointingly poor Pestalozzi did not

realize. For Pestalozzi was poor not only as to worldly goods but also

as to his knowledge of worldly affairs, particularly in their financial

aspects. Pestalozzi had, however, a quality which Rousseau lacked, the

quality of sincerity of purpose. After the failure of his farm school he

wrote “Leonard and Gertrude”, which was most successful and later his

book called “How Gertrude Teaches Her Children” portrayed a sec-

ondary phase of his work: his efforts to train prospective teachers to

carry into practice the methods of instruction he believed should govern

all classroom work. These educational methods were, as we have indi-

cated, based upon the “return to nature” principles of “Emile” and the

purpose was to realize throughout all society the revolutionary order

which “The Social Contract” indicated and the French Revolution had,

to his trusting soul, achieved.

As an educational reformer Pestalozzi was, throughout the major

part of his life, a failure. It was not until the latter part of his life

that he was able to accomplish much in his efforts to reform European

education. This he brought to pass through his Institute at Yverdon. It

was here that the modern secular elementary school idea with its rejec-



Page Eighteen AMERICAN EDUCATION:

tion of all religious aims and purposes was initiated and it was here

that he made his first great impression in his efforts to change the

prevalent methods of teaching.

Prior to his work at Yverdon attention had been directed to Pestalozzi

largely because of his writings in the field of educational theories. By

reason of the wide acclaim with which “Leonard and Gertrude” had been

received he was with George Washington and Thomas Paine made a

“citizen” of the French Republic. In reality this gives evidence of the

great influence of Rousseau upon the thought of his times, for Pestalozzi

was after all but the more or less inexpert practitioner of the ideas ini-

tially proposed in “Emile”. These ideas were, as we now can vividly

see, the forerunners of present day communistic and socialistic influences

in the field of education. Among the ideas which Pestalozzi attempted

to realize in practice was the inauguration of a program of learning

based upon a study of the “whole child” and the natural development

of his instinctive responses to his immediate environment. He endeavored

to carry out in his school practices what he had emphasized in “How

Gertrude Teaches Her Children”; namely, that “the recognition of sense

impression is the absolute foundation of all attempts to impart knowl-

edge”. As a result of Pestalozzi’s work, object study became essential

to all good teaching.

The influence of Pestalozzi upon American education was strong,

for a short period of time at least, as we shall later see. At length, how-

ever, his theories and methods gave way before the wider influence ex-

erted upon the schools of the United States of America by two other

European educational reformers. Before we leave Pestalozzi we should

say that we shall have occasion to refer to him again because of the

fact, that the influence of Rousseau through Pestalozzi’s work has become

basic to many of the practices and much of the content of the study

of education in the schools and colleges of this country today. How

communism and socialism have become in this twentieth century con-

nected with the scholastic atmosphere of the United States is not an

inexplicable riddle. The problem stems from the revolutionary theories

of Rousseau which were carried into the schools by Pestalozzi. Our

schools and colleges are returning to these principles and practices.

That they are doing so is not an accident but rather by reason of the

well-planned and cleverly executed designs of present day educational

reformers, who are relying upon the schools to build a new social order



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Nineteen

along the lines suggested by Jean Jacques Rousseau in the years immedi-

ately preceding the French Revolution.

Herbart

Herbart had only one fact of his life in common with Pestalozzi.

Both were native Germans. In all other respects they differed markedly.

Herbart was a student, a psychologist and a philosopher. His interest

was not in the regeneration of society through education but rather in

the part that formal education could play in the development of per-

sonal character. The method and the content of instruction interested

him greatly. As a result of his work there eventually came to pass a

heightened interest in the development of normal schools for the better

education of prospective teachers in the formal process of instruction.

Education should be regarded, so thought Herbart, as a formal

process. To the formal process of each lesson there should be four well

indicated and definitely separated steps:

1. Preparation

2. Presentation

3. Generalization

4. Application

To these four formal steps his most noted disciple, Tuiskon Ziller,

added another step, that of assimilation. This he presented between the

second and the third steps of Herbart’s original plan. As the teaching

plan finally came into use, modified by Ziller’s addition, the five formal

steps of Herbart as they were generally known were:

1. Preparation — the recalling to mind by the learner of known

facts related to the new subject matter to be presented.

2. Presentation — the introduction of the new unit of instruction.

3. Assimilation — the establishment in the mind of the learner of

the relationship between the new and the old.

4. Generalization — the wording by the learner of the general prin-

ciple or rule of thought and conduct derived as a result of

the particular lesson.



Page Twenty AMERICAN EDUCATION:

5. Application — the use by the learner of the results achieved by

the instructional unit of the lesson.

From the mere study of the five formal steps of instruction can be

gleaned an appreciation of the systematic, logical mind that Herbart

possessed and its great contrast to the poorly organized but sympathetic

approach presented by Pestalozzi in his effort to effect a change in

educational procedure. It must be understood, however, that Herbart

thoroughly believed in the many-sidedness of interest that the learner

should be enticed to exhibit. To him, however, interest was not so

much a physical manifestation as an intellectual one. He did not believe

in what he regarded as the more or less haphazard “doing activities” of

Pestalozzi, or recognize them as interest. Interest to Herbart was a

matter of mental activity more than that of the activity of the body. He

did not subscribe to the notion that abstract ideas connected with duty

and with the achievement of good personal character, which to him

seemed the prime purpose of instruction, could be learned and utilized

by “doing” or by “following nature” as Pestalozzi had inculcated. He

visited Pestalozzi’s school and had great admiration for the sympathetic

approach of the master but rebelled at the lack of orderliness and sys-

tem in the teaching. While both the older and the younger man agreed

that interest was a necessary factor in the learning process, they disagreed

on the basic meaning of the term both used. To Pestalozzi interest meant

“self-expression” as manifested by bodily activity; to Herbart interest

meant the enjoyment of the awareness of an intellectual relationship

of ideas.

We have indicated the great popularity enjoyed by Pestalozzi as a

result of the publication of his educational theories. Herbart spent the

latter years of his life as the successor to Kant at the University of

Gottingen where he occupied the chair of philosophy. His thoughts on

education awakened little interest or attention during his lifetime. It

was not until 1865 that such interest arose. Tuiskon Ziller, a professor

at Leipzig University, in that year published a book attempting to show

the direct relationship between Herbart’s formal approach to instruction

and good character building. By his book Ziller awakened interest in

the work the late Dr. Herbart of Gottingen University had done in the

field of education and who, by reason of his interest in children and

their moral development, established what we might properly call the

Herbartian school of educational thought. It was Ziller who actually



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Twenty-one

presented the five formal steps of instruction as we have described them.

Herbart in his presentation had included only four steps as we have

previously indicated. He had not provided the third step which Ziller

thought should be definitely indicated. It was also Ziller, who by reason

of his belief in the Herbartian psychological principles, evolved the

Culture Epoch Theory. This theory, based upon an exaggeration of a

study of the “whole child”, endeavored to show that the human being

in his life span or at least in that period of it including infancy, child-

hood, pubescence and adolescence, repeated in his development the

cycles through which the human race had passed in the evolutionary

process. The exaggeration and distortion of Herbart’s thought were as

marked characteristics of his followers in the Herbartian school as are

the thought processes of the followers of Froebel, an educational reformer

whom we shall now consider. These exaggerations and distortions have

been especially prominent in the United States of America as we later

on shall attempt to indicate.

Froebel

Froebel had a most unhappy childhood and youth. He was a strange

boy, by nature the very opposite of the type of youth he hoped, by the

character of education he eventually outlined in his greatest book “The

Education of Man”, to be helpful in developing. As a young man he

was somewhat morbid, exceedingly shy and markedly effeminate. At the

age of twenty-three he decided to become a teacher. He went to Pesta-

lozzi’s school at Yverdon and stayed there for two years, part of the

time as a student and during the second year as a teacher.

It was as a result of his experience at Yverdon that he came to

believe that the child is essentially craving action not learning. It became

his thought to make play the center of the school unit. With this thought

in mind he established a small school. In this, the education of the few

children he had attracted centered around their self-activity as expressed

in games, music and simple manual tasks. The school survived for about

ten years; but finally, the financial problems the conduct of the school

entailed proved insurmountable to Froebel and he gave up the struggle.

After the failure of his school Froebel taught for a time in Switzer-

land. He then returned to Germany where, in 1840, he established the

first kindergarten.



Page Twenty-two AMERICAN EDUCATION:

In this new type of school for young children, and Froebel was

essentially interested in the education of young children, the activity

of the learner through play and simple occupations was basic. Through

his activity the child was to become self-expressive. Self-expression was

the ideal that Froebel sought. It was the goal of the activities he pro-

vided. The games were, in Froebel’s thought, to provide more than mere

absorption of the child’s animal restlessness. They and the occupations

that characterized his kindergarten were centered around a thought

which to Froebel was most important though it left little impress upon

the practices of his own time and has been eliminated entirely from the

kindergartens of today.

To Froebel the kindergarten was to serve a great religious purpose.

As we have indicated Froebel was exceedingly introspective. There was

in his thought that which led to the establishment of the first kinder-

garten: a close relationship to mysticism, to symbolism. The games were

played in a circle. The children sat in a circle. The first plaything used

was a ball. The simple paper chains the children made, and still make

in our present day kindergartens, were and are constituted of rings of

paper. To Froebel all the circles indicated one fact — eternity. For him

the symbolism manifested God as did the circle, “without beginning and

without end”. His generation did not become enthusiastic over the idea

and it is doubtful whether any children after exposure to the kinder-

garten idea through their games, plays, songs and occupations, ever

appreciated the idea latent in the circle in which they sat or the endless

chains they made.

Though the symbolism in Froebel’s kindergarten idea never seemed

to be understood, it was and is still there. In Germany there was little

interest in his work. He was regarded as a fanatic. It was not until

almost the very close of his life that any recognition at all was accorded

him. This recognition came to him not through his own efforts but

rather through the work of Baroness von Marenholtz who publicized his

ideas in a far better manner than he himself was ever able to do.

Her work, superior in its excellence of detail, while it made Froebel

better known than he had ever been before, brought down upon him

the wrath of the Prussian Government and its edict forbidding kinder-

gartens in Prussia.

As a result of the expulsion of the kindergarten from the military

state of Prussia, Baroness von Marenholtz went to England where she



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Twenty-three

and the Froebelian educational ideas she expounded in lecture tours

were well received. Several kindergartens were established in England

but it is interesting to observe that they came into existence not so

much as a piece of educational experimentation but rather as a socio-

logical force, which it was thought might be of considerable help in

poorer sections, particularly in crowded sections of cities, in caring for

children at an earlier age than did the ordinary schools. However, the

Froebelian ideas did not really make much headway in Europe until

the time of the First World War. Even in the United States when the

kindergarten was first accepted as part of the public school system it

was largely on the basis of its sociological value that it won recognition.

This initial introduction came in the city of St. Louis where a Miss

Susan Blow accepted the invitation of Superintendent of Schools William

T. Harris, to come to that city for the purpose of establishing the first

public kindergarten in the United States. This was in 1873. There were

a few private kindergartens in the country before that time and in addi-

tion there were a few schools in existence for the training of prospective

kindergarten teachers. One of these training schools had been opened

in the City of New York in 1872. It was at this school, conducted by

Miss Marie Boelte, that the first public school kindergartner had been

trained.

The Froebelian idea: the importance of creative self-activity to the

education of the child and the employment of this self-activity, which

Froebel identified with interest, through play and simple problems in

manual training, in the process of directing him toward the great sym-

bolism of life, was not and is not today, though kindergartens have

spread throughout the world, generally appreciated or even understood.

The Froebelian idea is basic to the whole thought of the “new” educa-

tion as we shall endeavor to explain, in detail, in our consideration of

the forces which starting to operate in this country in the last decade

of the nineteenth century and continuing even until today have tried

and are still trying, by an exaggeration and a distortion of the Froebel

thought of self-activity, with its accent upon the freedom of self-expres-

sion, to use the schools of the United States to convert our Representa-

tive Republic into a Socialistic State. Through the extension of the

kindergarten idea into our elementary schools, high schools and colleges

the pragmatic educational reformers of the United States would use the

essentially religious Froebel, by means of their atheistic socialism to



Page Twenty-four AMERICAN EDUCATION:

direct the youth of America along a road of unlimited self-expression

leading toward the new social order which they would have him and

his teachers dare to build in this country. They did it in Russia and

they would do it in the United States. The immediate result in Russia

has not pleased them too well but they would try again here.

Froebel’s thought is the foundation of the work of the “Progressives”

and the “Social Frontiersmen” of today. In a very logical manner his

basic ideas led to the development of our manual training courses and

schools. In a very illogical manner his ideas have been distorted to

mean something far different from anything he ever had in mind. This

we shall present hereafter.

There are two men whom we should consider at this time because

they have been of influence in shaping our world along the lines which

made it possible for the educational reformers, rampant in the United

States today, to bend our educational systems, by means of the atheistic

socialism they profess combined with the self-expressionism to which

Froebel gave emphasis, away from their true reasons for being. Neither

of these men was an educator though one, the first of the two we shall

name, it is interesting to observe, served for a brief time along with

Froebel at Pestalozzfs school at Yverdon. They are Georg Wilhelm

Hegel (1770-1831) and Karl Marx (1818-1883).

Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was bom at Stuttgart, Germany, in

1770. At the theological seminary at Tubingen, which he entered in

1788, he devoted himself to a study of the philosophy of Immanuel

Kant. Later, in 1801, he entered the University of Jena where he formu-

lated the philosophy which has done so much to change our Western

civilization and to alienate it from the Christian principles with which

it had been previously identified.

To Hegel “the rational alone is real”. From this basic idea Hegel

reached the fundamental thesis of his thought, that there is no reality

beyond the evolutionary process from which our modern world de-

veloped. There is, in his thought, no room for God or the Absolute

except as it exists in the activity which man sees all around him and

which is the only reality he can genuinely understand. That which he



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Twenty-five

can understand is for man the only genuine reality that for him exists.

Man can experience and make an effort to understand the variety of

changes in life with which he is confronted. He can understand these

changes, thought Hegel, and he can understand nothing else. For him

these changes, or “this evolutionary process” as he expressed it, con-

stitute not only reality but the only reality there genuinely is. This

process of evolution, this daily experience which we have by reason of

our contacts with reality, constitutes the Absolute. For Hegel it consti-

tutes the essence of what men call God.

This concept of God makes Hegel at heart an atheist and explains

the anti-Christian trend of thought which has stemmed from him and

from Heidelberg University where he served as professor of philosophy

from 1816 until his death in 1831. It explains the reason for the em-

phasis upon the social and the economic conditions of life which has

existed from his day until the present. It explains the rise of communism

under the leadership of one of his better known disciples, Karl Marx.

It explains the rise of the autocratic concept and rule of government

so common in Europe and even in our own America today. If the con-

cepts of democracy as realized by the United States eventually decay

and fall into ruin it will in large measure be attributable to the thought

of Georg Hegel and his followers. It will in addition be attributable

to an apathy, to a loss of appreciation of the essential worth of the

fundamental principles upon which our government was founded and

to too strong a devotion to the golden calf of “American Prosperity and

‘Know How’ ”.

Hegel made definite application of his philosophic thought to social

conditions. He explicitly taught that the State exists for the realization

of an idea and to the realization of that idea all private interests must

be sacrified. The State exists, Hegel taught, for the realization of the

best possible economic development that its autocratic government can

devise. The State must not be conceived as existing for the purpose of

assuring to its citizens life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The

State does not exist for the benefit of its individual citizens. The citizens

exist for the State. Family and individual benefits must yield to State

interests.

The paramount interests of the State are aptly illustrated in times

of war for war is, according to Hegel, the only means by which genuine

social progress can be attained. War is the Absolute in process of devel-



Page Twenty-six AMERICAN EDUCATION:

opment, for ideas resound in the roar of cannons. It is true, says Hegel,

that both individuals and families suffer in war time but right has through

war the only real opportunity to establish itself. The victor is, according

to Hegel, always right. The nation that survives is the nation that should

survive and it, for the time being at least, constitutes the chosen people

and by it progress is assured and by it the world's evolution is given

hope of achievement. War therefore, says Hegel, is good. It is to be

approved and fostered, not condemned.

Hegel prepared the way for communism and for the establishment

of autocratic government as a means of achieving it. He prepared the

way for “progressive" education with its emphasis upon activity and

“activity programs”. He prepared the way for the attempt to establish

in the United States of America an overlordship in education such as

the National Education Association has been striving to accomplish

since the time of the First World War. Through his disciple Karl Marx

and the latter's economic and political followers in general and through

education in particular, he is presenting every day to the citizens of this

country problems we must solve within the framework of the reasons

we came into existence as a nation to achieve or American representative

government will cease to be. The issue may be and in all probability

will be definitely decided within the next few years.

Marx

Marx was a German of Jewish parentage. He studied at the Univer-

sity of Jena where Hegel taught. It was at Jena, where he received his

doctor's degree, that he came under Hegel’s influence and where he

developed his thoughts on “scientific” socialism or Marxian socialism

as his followers termed it. He himself called it by the name under which

we now know it, that of communism.

Socialism presented many divisions in Europe during the nineteenth

century. There were the “rightists”, the “leftists” and the “middle of the

roaders” or the centre group of moderate socialism. Under Marx in

Germany the “leftists” gained strength chiefly through the influence

wielded by a radical Prussian newspaper which he edited. As a result

of his attacks on the government he was ordered to leave Prussia. He

went to France and soon became in that country the motivating force

behind a group of Socialists and Anarchists among whom were Engels,



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW’ Page Twenty-seven

Blanc on the side of socialism and Proudhon and Bakunin from the

ranks of anarchism.

Marx’s leadership of the radical French groups was too extreme for

the conservative government of his day and in consequence he was soon

invited to leave the country. He went to England where he resided until

his death. It was in England that he wrote his best known work “Das

Kapital”. His earlier work the “Communist Manifesto” was in reality

produced by the combined effort of himself and of Frederick Engels

during his stay in France. It was published at Brussels and its function

was to point out to the workingmen of that city how an efficient labor

union could be brought into being.

Marxian socialism stems from “Das Kapital”. It has definite char-

acteristics. These characteristics are:

1. It is essentially atheistic.

2. It is a religion rather than simply an economic plan.

3. It advances the thought that the possession of wealth guarantees

power, both social and political, to the possessor.

4. It advances the idea that there is an inevitable class struggle

between those who possess wealth, the capitalists, and those

who do not, the proletarians.

5. The thought that there must be revolution, that the proletariat

must overcome the capitalistic class and establish itself as the

sole possessor of both all wealth and all power, is basic.

Though, as we have indicated, Marxian socialism is all included in

his large, four-volumed work — “Das Kapital”, it is interesting to observe

that the call to action by the proletariat appears in the final paragraph of

the “Communist Manifesto” written in collaboration with Frederick

Engels in 1848. It is this: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but

their chains. They have a world to win. Workmen of all countries unite.”

Socialism

There are those who tell us fanciful tales of socialism. Among these

are the following:



Page Twenty-eight AMERICAN EDUCATION:

1. Socialism is not necessarily atheistic. There are in the world

God-fearing, religious Socialists.

2. Socialism is very difficult to understand. There are many vari-

eties of it. There are evolutionary Socialists as well as Marx-

ian Socialists.

3. Socialism by revolution does not mean war or violence of any

kind. The word revolution to the Socialist means simply the

change from private to collective ownership of the means of

production. This change may be brought about by processes

of law resulting from logical social upheavals attributable to

discontent and prevalent conditions.

To provide a means of fanning the fires of discontent Marx organ-

ized the International Workingman’s Association. It failed in 1873

because of opposition to it by the people of several countries. In 1889,

six years after the death of Karl Marx, the Second International Work-

ingman’s Association was formed. The Second International was never

a very strong federation of Socialists and with the advent of the First

World War national loyalties overcame it. In 1919, however, at Moscow,

militant socialism, under the leadership of Lenin, established the Third

International. It was at Moscow that Russian domination of the move-

ment for a world revolution was initiated. It is this movement that

presents the great challenge to Western Christian civilization today.

It is this movement which is seeking disciples of Marx, of Lenin and

of Stalin in the United States of America, in the fields of government

service, of laboratory research, of labor unionism and of education.

It is deplorable that we must admit that Russia is not only seeking

disciples but that she is being notoriously successful in her search.

Russia’s success in winning to her cause American citizens who

would destroy the basic principles which have made and still make

this country the last hope in the world of Christian civilization, from

which the true meaning of Western Democracy stems, is strongly evi-

dent in the field of education. It is evident in our schools and colleges,

under both public and private control. It is evident in the country-

wide prevalence of the “New” Education. The “new” education is the

Third International in operation. To set forth the facts pertinent to the

establishment of atheistic socialism as the motivating force in American

education is the chief purpose of this book.



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Twenty-nine

A Summary

Modern education in the United States stems from the men upon

whose work we have dwelt. Upon the educational theories of Rousseau

and from the educational experimentation of Pestalozzi, Herbart and

Froebel American education, as it developed during the last decade of

the nineteenth century, and extended itself throughout the country, was

essentially based. During the early part of its experience in the United

States modern education in reality meant the dominance of the Herbart-

ian school of thought. Later the influence of Froebel became markedly

evident. Still later the power that Hegel exerted upon world thought

and the increasing interest in the attempt by world leaders such as

Hitler, Mussolini and Lenin to nationalize their struggles for power

through the atheistic socialism of Karl Marx and his false claim of being

the preserver of human rights affected American education and in fact

brought about the tragic situation with which our present day educa-

tional institutions, both public and private, are faced by reason of the

presence within them of “new educators” and by the encouragement

which such educators are receiving throughout the country from so-

called parents associations. Many of these parents associations, espe-

cially those in large urban centers, are led by those whose strong interest

is not in education but rather in political intrigue particularly as such

intrigue can be used to further the cause of Marxian socialism. This

situation is strongly evident in the City of New York, which from many

considerations but largely from the prevalence of crime, corruption in

public office, low politics leading to the selection of even judges in an

atmosphere which offends the nostrils and which a prominent justice of

the federal bench recently used a strong word to describe and from

Socialists who misuse labor organizations in the field of education, is

today the No. 1 problem of the United States of America.

The ideas that have influenced the trend of education in the modern

era and the sources from which they have emanated we present below

in outline form. We hope these sources of many of the good and several

of the not only erroneous but also dangerous concepts now prevalent

throughout the field of education in this country will be consulted as

we study the “new” education of the “Progressive” reformers. The inno-

vators and the ideas they advanced follow.



Page Thirty AMERICAN EDUCATION:

Rousseau

Pestalozzi

Herbart —

Froebel —

Education of the immature should follow nature.

We learn by doing.

Religion should have no part in the educational process.

The “whole child” and not his mind alone should be edu-

cated.

Religion should be definitely rejected as a guiding principle

in education.

We learn by doing.

We learn through our senses and in consequence the study

of objects in the world around us should constitute a

major part of the educational process.

Psychology should determine the formal educational proc-

ess. The many-sided interests of the learner should be

emphasized and used.

Education in schools should be a formal not an informal

process. To this process there are definite steps.

We advance in learning through what we already know,

not through object study.

The acquisition of ideas constitutes education.

Education should be concerned not with the reconstruction

and the regeneration of society but with the acquisition

of good character by the learner.

Learning comes through instruction not through “doing”

activities, many of which are haphazard and meaningless.

The teacher is the important element in the educational

process. He is to lead the learner not follow him.

“Doing” as exemplified in the freedom of play should char-

acterize education.

Self-expression should be fostered. Interest is to be identi-

fied with self-activity.

Education should portray a religious symbolism.

The kindergarten exemplifies a new educational concept.

A social, co-operative atmosphere should prevail there

and throughout the whole educational process.

We learn by doing and therefore construction exercises and

later trade training should constitute a vital part of the

educational process in our guidance of the “whole child”.



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Thirty-one

Hegel — A philosopher not essentially an educator.

Interested in social problems not in those especially related

to education.

Stressed the vital need and worth of an autocratic state.

Emphasized the value of war.

Prepared the way for many events of the twentieth century

not only in the field of government but also in that of

education.

Marx — Revolution is necessary.

“The proletariat must overcome the capitalistic class.”

Developed the idea of International Labor Unionism.

Father of modern socialism.

Not an educator but in reality one of the most important

influences in shaping the “new” education from whose

effects we are now suffering.

Pestalozzi was the first of the European educational reformers to

affect changes in American education. In 1871 William T. Harris, super-

intendent of the public schools of St. Louis, influenced changes in the

courses of study affecting the schools under his jurisdiction. These

changes included the introduction of a course in elementary science.

This innovation was definitely a reflection of the insistence of

Pestalozzi upon the beneficial effects of object study and of a study by

the child of the immediate environment in which he lived. To some

extent, however, the introduction of elementary science into the cur-

riculum of the schools of St. Louis by Superintendent Harris was the

effect of the reaction exhibited throughout America to the writings of

Herbert Spencer, one of England’s most noted scholars.

Spencer

Herbert Spencer was not essentially an educational reformer nor

can he be said to have been the initial cause of the changes that were

made in the public schools of the United States in the last quarter of

the nineteenth century. He did intensify the work of those European

innovators whom we have previously mentioned. His essay on “What

Knowledge Is of Most Worth?”, originally published in 1859, challenged

the value of the traditional classical educational program being univer-



Page Thirty-two AMERICAN EDUCATION:

sally followed in the English schools. In other essays he reviewed the

work of the educational reformers of earlier days. He answered the

question asked in his initial educational essay by announcing that to

him it seemed that science, not the classical studies, was of greater value

in the education of youth. Spencer was both a noted scholar and bril-

liant essayist. While the results of his proposals were not immediate,

one of them, a strong interest in the ideas and work of Pestalozzi, did

affect our American schools. The introduction of a course in elementary

science into the schools of St. Louis may be said to be the first indication

of what we have termed Modem Education in the schools of this coun-

try. It is tme that there are to be found instances of the introduction

of earlier reforms in education, here and there, in American schools con-

ducted under private controls. The work of Superintendent Harris is

the first instance of major effort in a public school system to adopt

the ideas of any of the European reformers and make them part of our

American system of education. In 1873, only two years after his intro-

duction of elementary science into the schools of St. Louis, Superin-

tendent Harris invited Miss Susan Blow, a young kindergartner, to

introduce Froebelian ideas into the public educational system of St.

Louis. We have referred to this action of Superintendent Harris in our

consideration of Froebel’s work.

Harris and Parker

In consequence of the leadership of William T. Harris the counsels

of Pestalozzi became operative in American education during the last

quarter of the nineteenth century. From this time on we have an educa-

tional interest in the "whole child” and not simply in his mind. We have

an interest in sense training, in manual activities, in trade schools and

in learning by doing. It must be borne in mind that these changes reflect

the thought of Rousseau as well as that of Pestalozzi. Indeed Pestalozzi

followed Rousseau in his educational theorizing and in his impractical

conduct of the practical work of schools. Rousseau’s revolutionary

thought was finding its way into our American schools. It is important

to keep this in mind for the complete secularization of education and

its divorce from religious influence, a consideration upon which Rousseau

insisted and which Pestalozzi echoed, had already become a major issue

in American education and still remains a major issue. To this issue



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Thirty-three

we shall return in our discussion of the “new” practices of American

education.

It is interesting to learn how restrictive and how old the newest cliche

of the “new” educators — “the whole child” — actually is. They parade it

often in their speech as a mask of their “progressive” tendencies. What

they do not parade is that the term stems from the atheistic concepts of

Rousseau and Pestalozzi. What they do not emphasize is that their con-

cept of “the whole child” as a creature of both body and mind, omits a

very vital component part of the actual whole child, his soul. For the

soul they have no consideration, neither did Rousseau nor Pestalozzi. Is

it any wonder that their ideas of character training produce “characters”

among the student body of some of our “new” high schools, who sell

narcotics in the halls of their schools as the recent report of Attorney

General Goldstein of the State of New Yorfk indicated?

The influence of Pestalozzi upon American schools was also reflected

in the work of Colonel Francis W. Parker who became a leader in the

movement to encourage the establishment of teacher training schools in

the city of Chicago. Colonel Parker was a follower of Pestalozzian ideas

and these ideas are reflected in a book he published in 1889 called “How

To Teach Geography.” This book exerted a strong influence upon the

content of education and gave to geography a leading place, though

unfortunately for only a relatively brief time, in the courses of study

adopted throughout the country for use in elementary schools.

During the period we usually refer to as “the gay nineties” object

teaching became a fetish in the schools. Based upon Pestalozzian ideas

concerning object study there developed a method of teaching arith-

metic which became, for a time, most fashionable and almost universal.

This was called “The Grube Method.” The method in reality was a

distortion of objective illustration, that is of the concrete in the repre-

sentation of abstract ideas in the field of mathematical reasoning. In

1900 Dr. David Eugene Smith called attention to the exaggerations and

errors of the Grube method. He issued a series of textbooks, for use in

elementary schools, which became very popular throughout this period

and which did a very effective job in helping to restore a better apprecia-

tion of the thoughts of Pestalozzi as they concerned object study. Yet

the degeneration of the Pestalozzian ideas was after all but a logical

consequence of the lack of system and method in the work at Yverdon.

To this defect we have previously called attention.



Page Thirty-four AMERICAN EDUCATION:

Dewey

The attack upon the contributions of Pestalozzi, particularly as they

concerned the use of objects, that is of the concrete in the teaching of

abstract mathematical concepts to young children, brought fruit in

another quarter. It occasioned the initial entrance upon the American

educational scene of a young psychologist from Vermont but at this

time a resident in Chicago. In 1887 Dr. John Dewey published a psy-

chology. There was nothing particularly novel about this work, a text-

book for use in schools and colleges. It followed traditional lines and

bore no evidence of the exaggerated pragmatism with which Dr. Dewey

has since become identified. In 1895 in collaboration with another

student of psychology, a Dr. McClellan, Dr. Dewey published a book

called "The Psychology of Number.” This book showed in excellent

manner the absurdities of the Grube method and emphasized the true

meaning of mathematics and of mathematical relationships. It had,

however, little effect upon the schools at the time it was written and

directly has never had any marked effect on a nationwide scale upon

teaching methods in the subject of arithmetic. It is true, however, that

the ideas advanced in “The Psychology of Number” in 1895 are now in

1952 having an effect upon the teaching of arithmetic in the elementary

schools located in the City of New York, where Dr. Dewey’s influence is

at the present time, in the fields of both education and social reform,

exceedingly strong. We shall refer to this situation at greater length in

our consideration of the “New” American education.

In the nineties another influence arose which outweighed all others

in the field of educational method and that was the influence of Herbart.

The theories of Herbart we have previously outlined in some detail. We

have emphasized his belief in the formalism of education and outlined

his concept of the necessary steps in instruction, if education were to

result in worthwhile knowledge, in the integration of personality and in

good character. We have also noted his thoughts concerning the many-

sidedness of interest and the part that the appeal to the learner’s interests

should bear in the teaching process.

In the United States during the latter part of the last decade of the

nineteenth century, the influence of Herbart upon the educational theories

and practices of the schools became dominant. Among teachers, as

among physicians, cliches become established at times. The closing days

of the nineteenth century owing to the influence of Herbart fostered the



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Thirty-five

growth in educational circles, in teachers colleges and in normal schools,

of the stereotyped expressions “the apperceptive basis” and “the apper-

ceptive system.” These expressions indicated simply the first step in the

formal process which, according to Herbart, should be followed in

teaching. They indicated in “school language” the rather familiar notion

that the individual acquires new knowledge in terms of knowledge he

already possesses.

Herbart, as we have said, was a student of psychology. By reason

of his work in this field grew his doctrine of the many-sidedness of

interest and the use that should be made of it in teaching. The child

came to class, so Herbart taught, by reason of his natural inclinations,

his prior teaching and his experiences outside the classroom, with inter-

ests in many things. His interests were comparable to what in more

mature people we refer to as “hobbies.” These interests should, said

Herbart, be captivated by the teacher and an apperceptive basis estab-

lished before new knowledge was presented in the classroom. In the

child there should be established a systematic method of apprehending

and comprehending new knowledge. In consequence of the popularity of

Herbart’s thought, which popularity was in large measure attributable

to the teachings of the McMurry brothers, there grew up a strong,

Herbartian influence at Teachers College, Columbia University. Hence

the appearance of the cliches “apperceptive basis” and “apperceptive

systems” which we have noted as strongly evident in school circles

throughout the period of which we write.

In this same period, the closing years of the nineteenth century, Dr.

John Dewey, to whom we have previously referred in connection with

the opposition that became evident in Chicago to Pestalozzian methods

in the teaching of arithmetic, arose to prominence in the work of educa-

tional experimentation. In 1896, in an appearance before the National

Herbart Society, he made a strong attack upon the doctrine of interest

and its many-sided aspect as conceived by Herbart and as promulgated

by his followers who constituted in large measure the group to whom

he spoke.

Theories of Interest

Dewey, in his elaboration of the doctrine of interest, supported the

principles Froebel had advanced and rejected the psychological ap-



Page Thirty-six AMERICAN EDUCATION:

proaches to classroom procedures of Herbart. In his paper before the

Herbart Society, Dewey identified interest with self-activity. In his

delineation he described interest in words which he used to define it in

a pamphlet he wrote some time later and which he called “Interest As

Related To Will.” In this pamphlet he wrote: “Interest is the identifica-

tion of the self with some object or with some idea because of the

necessity of that object or that idea to the maintenance of self-expression.”

In this definition there is not only resident the rejection of the many-

sidedness of interest theory of Herbart but there is, in addition, the

whole kernel of the “new education” which is of such great importance

to the people of the United States and of their children at the present

time. In this revelation of Dewey’s concept of identification between

interest and self-activity, we have his acceptance of Froebel and his

rejection of Herbart. This, at the time, may have been all there was in

the relatively young psychologist’s mind. There may have been nothing

there of the application of the exaggerated pragmatic philosophy, which

he later developed into a method of interpretation of social and industrial

life. At the moment, in all probability, there was but the thought of the

application of his doctrine of interest to teaching processes. This, most

certainly, was all that Colonel Francis W. Parker saw in it and which

attracted him to John Dewey.

As a result Dr. Dewey was invited to conduct an experimental

school at the University of Chicago and from 1896 until 1903 he was

engaged in this work. The introduction of Dewey’s notions of school

procedures into the curriculum and administration of the University

High School were not very successful but the association of his name

with the project provoked considerable publicity, as a result of which

he was offered an opportunity to join the faculty of Teachers College,

Columbia University, where the Herbartian current was, at the time,

steadily strong. Dewey came to New York in 1904 and steadily since

there has emanated from his shrine at Teachers College, for there are

those who worship him as “America’s foremost philosopher,” all the

developments which we shall now consider under the general title of

the “New” American Education.



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Thirty-seven

The “New” American Education

The first indication of the appearance of what has since been called

"the activity program” or the root system of the "new” education is

found in the work Dr. John Dewey attempted to do in the high school of

the University of Chicago. In the classrooms he attempted to apply to

secondary school work the principles which Froebel had outlined as

those which govern the kindergarten. Dewey attempted to use Froebel’s

ideas as a substitute for the Herbartian principles which had formerly

governed the experimental work the University was conducting in the

field of high school teaching methods. He used the principle of self-

expression, of freedom of discipline and of the choice by the pupil of

the content of instruction. He even substituted for the orderly, though

fixed arrangement of desks in the classrooms, the kindergarten arrange-

ment of moveable furniture. The experiment could not be called truly

successful, in fact the word unsuccessful would ordinarily be used and

actually was used to describe the results attained. Dr. Parker, who had

suggested the experiment, after Dr. Dewey had read his paper before the

Herbartian Society, cannot in honesty be called the "father of ‘progressive*

education.” In fact Dr. Parker was primarily interested in experimenta-

tion in the field of educational inquiry. He cannot, however, be given

credit or blame for the immediate results of the experiment at the Univer-

sity of Chicago’s high school. Credit or blame must rest on Dr. Dewey’s

shoulders. By reason of the work attempted he was the subject of much

criticism, both adverse and kindly, in educational circles of the time. He

received considerable publicity and in consequence was invited to come

to Teachers College of Columbia University. He accepted the invita-

tion and remained at the University until his retirement from active

service many years later.

Teachers College

From Teachers College has come the "new” education. From that

institution came, throughout the years of Dr. Dewey’s active work in

the field of teaching, many suggestions for changing the American social

order by means of the manipulation of educational forces. Suggestions

still come. Though Dr. Dewey has aged considerably he is still the

foremost educational reformer in the thought of many. In fact in the

thought of some he is "America’s foremost philosopher.” To our mind

there is no doubt that Dr. Dewey is a most interesting educational



Page Thirty-eight AMERICAN EDUCATION:

thinker. We cannot see in him, however, a philosopher of any merit but
we do acknowledge the fact that he has made many worthwhile

contributions to educational endeavor. We do not believe he should be
held responsible for all the ideas advanced and practices followed by

some of those who call themselves his disciples. In fact, not so long ago,

he rebuked his so called followers for advancing ideas in the name of

progressive education, ideas which he had never advocated.

The work that has been done in this, the first half of the twentieth

century, in the name of education and the relationship of that work to

the attempt to build in this country a new social order of socialistic

design is the work of those who have been closely associated with Dr.

Dewey at Teachers College. The work of “Social Frontiersmen,” as his

close associates have been called, is definitely the logical outgrowth of

his prior work. The degeneration of the schools of the United States of

America throughout the past fifteen years is directly related to his instru-

mentalistic philosophy, to his theories of the relativity of ideas, to his

exaggerated pragmatism and to his influence and that of his associates

at Teachers College in directing American education toward the values

which atheistic socialism approves.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, at the time Dr. Dewey

came to Teachers College, the influence of the McMurry brothers and

the principles of the Herbartian school of thought in the methodology

of teaching were strong. Dr. Dewey was on record as an opponent of

Herbart’s psychology, which had outlined the formal approach to educa-

tion and which we have described. Dewey advocated the Froebelian

approach to learning through play. He favored and taught the desirabil-

ity of extending the kindergarten idea to the elementary school and to

the high school as well. He advocated the theory of the freedom of

untrammeled self-expression to be granted the learner; he favored tho

dominance of “the whole child” in the classroom. Dewey conceived of

education as an informal process of learning from which all restraint

was to disappear, and not as a formal process directed by a trained

teacher leading the learner toward good personal character. According

to Herbart the teacher was to point the way; according to Dewey the

teacher was to follow the child who, by reason of his natural inclination,

would be directed toward the personal goals he should achieve by

co-operation with others in the efforts of humanity to achieve an ideal

social democracy.



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Thirty-nine

We have said that Dr. Dewey’s ideas were based upon the funda-

mentals of Froebel’s notions of what constituted good teaching. In

essence they were. We must not blame the shy, essentially religious

Froebel, however, for all the ideas Dewey advanced. At Teachers College

Dr. Dewey added many non-sequiturs to the kindergarten idea of the

freedom of self-expression through play. These non-sequiturs constitute

Dewey’s contributions to educational procedures. They are essentially

his thoughts and the thoughts of the men he gathered around him and

who formed the core of the John Dewey Society. The responsibility for

the degeneration of American education through the “progressive” meth-

ods of the “new” education, which is leading the United States, by

means of her schools, to collectivism rests upon John Dewey and his

followers. They are truly the enemies of genuine American education.

The initial division between the two schools af thought at Teachers

College, after the addition of Dr. Dewey’s name to the faculty roster, was

a psychological one. Herbart had been a psychologist; Dewey was one.

It was inevitable that they should differ. In my experience it takes only

two psychologists to make a world of differences. The difference in this

case, as we have indicated, concerned the doctrine of interest. To

Herbart interest signified the intellectual concern of an individual over

an idea which came before his mind. It represented a condition of

mind the teacher should try to captivate if it existed or create if it did

not. Interest to Herbart might, therefore, be factitious or genuine. For

classroom purposes it did not matter. The art of the teacher could make

the “make believe” as vital as the real. To Dewey interest was self-

activity. It might be intellectual or it might be physical. It was the

identification of the learner, any learner, young or old, with some object

or some idea in a way that made the object or the idea of vital impor-

tance to him. It was natural. The teacher should not seek to produce it.

The teacher, on the other hand, should make it his guide. He should

follow it, not seek to direct it. His aim should be through natural

interest, natural self-activity, to aid the learner in the co-operation neces-

sary, to the building of a better social world.

We may with reasonableness conclude that Herbart’s theories pointed

toward the realization of good personal character on the basis of the

clarification of ideas. Dewey’s ideas, for we should like to repeat

that they were his, not Froebel’s, point toward the realization of the

potential possibilities of an individual through the freedom of self-



Page Forty AMERICAN EDUCATION:

expression indicated in play. In one sense, a limited sense, we may

conceive of the contest that was in process at Teachers College and, by

the contacts which that institution had established with the schools of

America, a struggle between the ideas of Herbart and those of Froebel.

It was, however, more than that. It bore the germ of a struggle, through

the schools, and by reason of the implications of Dewey’s addition to

Froebel’s premises, between our American way of life and atheistic

socialism. It is this concept of the struggle that loyal Americans

throughout all America are only now, almost fifty years too late, begin-

ning to understand.

The Social Frontiersmen

Associated with Dr. John Dewey have been between 1904 and the

present time, a number of men whose names have since become familiar

in the effort to effect an educational revolution in this country. The

more prominent of these are: William H. Kilpatrick, John L. Childs,

George S. Counts, Jesse Newton, Harold Rugg, Goodwin Watson,

Charles A. Beard, George W. Hartmann, Boyd Bode, Willard E. Goslin

and Ernest O. Melby. In the early activities of this group there arose

the Dalton Plan of education. The Dalton plan was an effort to have the

child determine the rate of progress he should make in school and the

amount of work he should actually do. In accordance with the plan

the pupil regularly made contracts covering the assignments of work he

agreed to undertake. The plan represented an effort to individualize the

school. We need not dwell upon it because it made little effective

impression upon education in America. It, however, attracted some

attention in England and China.

Another effort made by the Dewey group, which soon became the

John Dewey Society, was the “project method.” This was an effort to

recast the curriculum of the school into units by reason of the problems

pupils would undertake, under a system somewhat similar in nature to

the Dalton Plan. The interesting point about the “project method” is

that it was the forerunner of the “core curriculum” now uppermost as an

educational cliche of the moment and as often spoken as its relative,

“the whole child” which latter term in reality is not new but dates back,

as we have seen, to the days of Pestalozzi.

In the Dalton plan and in the “project method” we see revealed the

essence of an earlier thought of John Dewey as expressed by his work



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Forty-one

at Teachers College. The thought is that in the education of the child

effort, gratuitous effort, work accomplished by dogged determination is

as necessary as is interest. The Froebelians at Teachers College in the

early part of the century made much of the idea that the child must be

made to realize that the school does not exist for the purpose of keeping

him happy. There are tasks to be done which he must do, whether they

appear to him pleasant or not. He can not drop an assigned task, even

though he himself assigned it to himself, at some point where it ceases

to interest him, prior to his completion of it. There is such an entity as

duty. Interest is, in other words, always to be related to will.

The thought of duty, of responsibility, has given way in the
4

new”

education to self-expression which is never to be thwarted or frustrated.

This thought was not an original factor in Dewey’s plan when he started

his work at Teachers College. The germ of error was however, in

Dewey’s thought, and it was this germ of error which grew into the doc-

trine of "progressive” education which has ruined so many American

youths and which threatens the continuance of our American way of life.

It was this germ of thought which was deliberately given opportunity to

grow to proportions which at the beginning of the century were not part

of the thinking of the John Dewey Society, later to become the

Progressive Education Association and still later the American Education

Fellowship and now part of the steering apparatus of the National Edu-

cation Association. The growth of “progressive” education, under the

name of the “activity program” took place in Russia. The seed for its

growth was planted in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics in 1917.

In the year 1917 occurred the Russian revolution and the abdication

of the Czar. This revolution was led by Kerensky. He attempted to set

up a democratic regime. His attempt was short-lived. The leaders of

Rolshevism, who had been exiled from their country during the rule of

Czar Nicholas II, returned to Russia. Among those who returned in 1917

were Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. Czar Nicholas II and his family were

murdered by Rolshevists on October 10, 1918.

Leon Trotsky had been living for some sime prior to 1917 in the

northern section of the City of New York, not too far removed from

Teachers College. He was employed in the garment industry and was

a leader in the Garment Workers Union. This union has been throughout

its history identified with the educational activities of the city. Its interest

continues until the present day in which it has resulted, in collaboration



Page Forty-two AMERICAN EDUCATION:

with the Board of Education of the City of New York in the erection

and maintenance of a vocational school building in which is located a

high school and a collegiate institute devoted to the promotion of the

interests of the garment industry.

In 1917 Trotsky’s influence in labor union activities in the City of

New York was strong. Dr. John Dewey of Teachers College was a

member of the Teachers Union. Union activities interested both. How

much Trotsky learned of Dewey’s interest theory of education, of his

exaggerations of Froebel’s ideas, of his subscription to the thought of

the relativism of ideas, of his denial of the Absolute, of his belief that

religion was but an opiate of the people and of his philosophy of instru-

mentalism, that concept of distorted pragmatism, which pointed the way

toward the realization by man through definite activity on his part to

the establishment of a new social order, we do not know. We do know

that in Dewey’s ideas and in his educational theories advanced both in

Chicago in the early days of his career and in the City of New York at

Teachers College, Trotsky could have found much comfort. He could

have found a plan to revolutionize the Russian educational system and

fashion it along the lines of Marxian socialism.

Russia and the Activity Program

Shortly after Trotsky’s return to the Soviet Union Dewey’s “progres-

sive” educational principles were, under the name of “the activity pro-

gram” introduced into the Russian schools. Lenin who had become the

acknowledged leader of the Bolshevist forces adopted “progressive” edu-

cation in 1917. At the time he boasted that in four years, by means of

the education of the young, he could change old Mother Russia, despite

its essentially religious God-fearing people, into a communistic, atheistic

state. Though murders, purges and persecutions were numerous he had

quite realized his purposes not in four years but by 1924, the year of

his death.

After Lenin’s death there ensued a struggle for power. Trotsky

announced himself as in favor of a world-wide effort, along Marxian

lines, in the industrial centres of the world but particularly directed

to workmen in England, Germany and the United States, for the

supremacy on a global basis of atheistic communism. Stalin, on the

other hand, protested that the time was not ripe for such a movement.

Marxian Socialists, or Communists as by this time they were commonly



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Forty-three

called, should first realize “collectivism” in Russia. Time was necessary

to prepare adequately for the world wide inevitable struggle that would

annihilate all German, English and American capitalism, so preached

Stalin. Stalin won. Trotsky fled Russia and sought asylum in Mexico,

where he was subsequently murdered. It is interesting to add the

historical note that Dr. John Dewey shortly thereafter went to Mexico.

He headed a commission interested in ascertaining the details of Trot-

sky’s murder. He demonstrated his loyalty, if not to a cause, at least to

a kindred thinker.

When Stalin in 1927 re-organized the government and provided for

the five year plan which was to start in the following year he gave

close study to the complaints that had been filed by the Commissar of

Education as early as 1920 and every year thereafter against the “activity

program”. However, though all other departments underwent re-organ-

ization it was decided that the Department of Education would remain

in status quo and that the “activity program” would continue. We do not

know, and in all probability shall never learn what bearing, if any the

trip Dr. George S. Counts made to Russia at about this time had on

the matter. In fact this was not the only visit George Counts, who with

D. William H. Kilpatrick apparently constituted Dr. Dewey’s advertising

force, paid to the Soviet Union. He went to Russia on two other occa-

sions between 1917 and 1933, the year in which the “activity program”

was officially dropped from Russia’s educational program. All of his visits

were extended. On one of his trips he journeyed six thousand miles by

automobile throughout the Soviet and so came into contact with the

people and the schools. He knows the Russia of “activity program” days

and the Russia of today. He knows the efforts Stalin has made to make

the young citizens of the Soviet embrace communism and to hate

Western Christian civilization. He could be a masterful force in this

country to stem the current that is trying to make young Americans

resemble young Russians in their aspirations and desires. He knows

the situation as few men do. We hope he will, in time, see the light of

truth, desert the group that now represents a dangerous force in our

Western civilization, and become a leader in the educational world

of America, rather than continue as a follower in the camp of the

atheistic Socialists who now constitute the army of genuine enemies of

America and her schools, which army Dr. John Dewey despite his years,

is still leading.



Page Forty-jour AMERICAN EDUCATION:

It is fitting that, at this time, we revert to America and examine the

situation that developed here between 1917 and 1932, the period which

brought about the great changes which 3,000,000 Communists had been

able to effect in Russia with a total population of 200,000,000 people.

Russia through her schools and her vast army of ignorant, undisciplined,

delinquent, migratory youth which those schools by the “activity pro-

gram” and the doctrine of the freedom of self-expression had produced,

was now in a condition which needed the strong arm of stern rule.

Lenin was right in his judgment of the changes that could be wrought

through the type of education about which Trotsky had talked and about

which he had probably learned in the City of New York. Stalin was

right in continuing the “activity program” in Russia until 1933 and not

ejecting it, as it had been suggested to him to do, in 1927. Now in 1933

it was evident that his plan of becoming the generalissimo of Russia and

her satellites, of becoming the imperialist he always purposed to be, was

possibie. The need of force was apparent. Force had been used con-

sistently since 1917. There was, however, an undercurrent of opposition.

Now to curb the depredations of youth, to control them and compel them

to be obedient and respectful to their parents, teachers and official

superiors, the use of force was not only necessary but in addition its use

would be approved by all citizens of the Soviet who desired law and

order to prevail. The dreadful “activity program” which had been im-

ported into Russia from capitalistic America had been proved to be a

destructive, poisonous force. A change was mandatory, so read Stalin’s

propaganda and Stalin was right. What he did not add was the thought

that “it had been planned that way.”

The National Education Association

In 1914 the First World War began. In 1917 we entered the war.

In that same year the Russian Revolution took place and Russia with-

drew from the war. In that same year there took place in America an

attempt to take away from the several states the control each held over

the education of its people and to situate that control in the Federal

Government. Feverishly supported by the National Education Associa-

tion the Smith-Towner bill providing for an appropriation of $300,000,000

for the support of education in the States was introduced into Congress.

This was not the simple, benevolent piece of legislation it appeared to be.

The genuine purpose was to grant to the Department of the Interior

federal control of education. The framers of the bill knew that “he who



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Forty-five

holds the purse strings, holds the power”. The plan, however, failed. The

Smith-Towner bill was killed but the campaign waged in its behalf

proved beneficial to the National Education Association. From 1917 until

the present its influence and its power have increased until it now pre-

sents itself as a force threatening not only state control of education but

the American way of life itself. We shall have occasion to revert to the

N. E. A. again in connection with the further development of the “new”

education in this country.

In this period there also arose the question of religion in the schools.

This issue, most Americans thought, had been definitely settled seventy-

five years earlier. The public schools of this country, it was agreed, had

been secularized. It was likewise a matter of universal agreement among

Americans that citizens who believed religious values should permeate

education had the right to erect, support and send their children to such

religious schools. There had grown up throughout the country a great

numer of schools systems, some under Lutheran and some under Catholic

church control, since the days of Horace Mann in Massachusetts and

Bishop John Hughes in New York. In 1925, however, the state of

Oregon questioned this settlement and threw new light, or shall we say

new shadows, on the question by enacting legislation providing that

all children of school age in the state must attend the public schools.

A dispute arose which became a matter of national interest. The matter

was taken to the Supreme Court of the United States for a decision.

The Court decided that a citizen had the right to send his children

to any school of his choice anywhere in the United States, so long as

the school met the basic educational requirements of the state in

which it was located. So ended the issue. At least we thought so at

the time, but recently President James B. Conant of Harvard University

revived it. He was supported in his attack upon the parochial schools,

by Dr. John K. Norton, of Teachers College and of the National Edu-

cation Association.

These two questions, one of the federal control over education

in the several states, the other of the power that could be exercised

by state school authorities over compulsory school attendance, were

very important and are still of importance. They are important in

themselves and they are important from another consideration, a

consideration that came to be and still is the most important con-

sideration of all. This consideration is the matter of how autocratic



Page Forty-six AMERICAN EDUCATION:

and controlling are governments to be. We have seeen how controlling

and autocratic they became in the name of so-called “Social Democracy,”

the false democracy of communism in Russia. The question raises the

thought of the danger of excessive governmental control and whether

it has not become a genuine menace to the representative republic of

the United States. The answer to this question can be found, we believe,

in a further study of the history of the “new” education in this country.

Such study reveals its kinship to the Russian pattern.

City of New York Adopts Activity Program

In a booklet “Progressive Poison in Public Education,” which we

published recently, we outlined the history of the “new” education or the

“activity program” as following the Russian pattern, it was first officially

called in The City of New York. We showed the undemocratic methods

by which it had been introduced and forced into the public schools

against the persistent protests of the teachers. We indicated the de-

generation it had wrought in the Russian schools. This portrayal

we do not intend to repeat here. It is well known. We do, however,

wish to repeat what is also well known, it is true, but which still needs

emphasis. It is this: The same forces at Teachers College whose ac-

tivities were evident in the introduction of the activity program

into the Soviet’s system of schools in 1917 were behind the pressure

that caused it to be adopted by the Roard of Education on an experi-

mental basis for the first three years of the elementary school curriculum

by the City of New York in 1935. Two years after it had been ex-

pelled from Russia the activity program was adopted by The City

of New York, despite, or perhaps because of, what its effects had been

shown to have been in Russia. Of these effects Commissar Epstein of

the Soviet’s Department of Education said at the time of the expulsion

of the activity program from the schools of the Soviet in 1933, “It gave

the children a superficial knowledge of a great many things, but it did not

give to them a proper educational foundation. Time was wasted in

excursions and visits for experience. They could talk about the railway

lines in their towns or about local factories, but they could not talk

correctly about anything. Their language and their arithmetic were

equally bad.”

Yet the activity program was fastened upon the schools of the City

of New York in 1935 by the help of those who are now trying, it seems,



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Forty-seven

to fasten communism upon this country. These protagonists of the

“new” education apparently agree with Lenin and Stalin that through

the schools and through the “new” education, a breakdown of good

character among the youth can be effected and the need for an auto-

cratic government made apparent as it was in Russia. So they hope.

So do many Russians still hope but the equality of man and his hold

on life, liberty and happiness in Russia is more tenuous now than it

was in the days of the Czars. Will it become some day a dream

here as it is to day in Russia? Unless we check the progress of the

“new” education here before prospective imperialists have an oppor-

tunity to fasten their hold upon our country the “new” education

may be as successful in the United States, as Joseph Stalin estimates

it to have been in the Soviet. The danger is real. Many American

communities have risen against the “progressive” elements which have

sought to control the education of their children by means of the “new”

concepts of freedom of self-expression of youth and “academic freedom”

of teachers, which in essence has come to mean, the freedom to intro-

duce atheistic socialism into education. The “new” education is not to be

identified with modern education as Dr. William H. Kilpatrick, Dr.

Dewey’s first convert at Teachers College, thinks it should. It is en-

tirely different. It is an effort to communize America.

Education Before and After 1935

American education reached its zenith in the period between

1912 and 1935. During this period all the better contributions of

the leading educational reformers we have mentioned and some of

the least noteworthy changes in which their suggestions had resulted,

fused into an educational Renaissance which made of the period included

between 1912 and 1935 a truly remarkable era in the history of American

education. During this period the contributions of Herbart were in

the ascendancy but in practice they were modified in actual classroom

work by the thoughts of Froebel as reflected in the Teacher Training

classes of Dr. John Dewy at Teachers College. These years, 1912 to 1935,

gave to Dewey and through him and his followers to Teachers College

of Columbia University, unquestioned leadership in the field of educa-

tional endeavor. During these years Dewey appeared in better light

than he ever appeared before and most certainly in better light than

he has appeared since. His philosophy, however, matured during this

period. It always had had since the days when he abandoned psychology



Page Forty-eight AMERICAN EDUCATION:

and entered into the field of educational experimentation, the element

which made it “too strong” for William James. Dewey's philosophy

with its exaggerated pragmatism, its atheism, degenerated into an in-

strumentalism which his disciples, more radical than even he had initially

been, by combination of it with the thoughts of Georg Hegel and the

economic theories of Karl Marx, developed into a scheme to change the

representative republic of the United States into a collectivistic state.

During the period between 1912 and 1935, however, only the better

possibility of Dewey's thoughts in the field of education came to fruition.

During this period classroom work was vivified. The first step of Her-

bart’s five formal steps of instruction became a problematic approach,

a challenge to the learner. Herbart’s tendency to lecturing, which had

resulted in the teacher talking too much in the classroom and the learner

too little, gave way under the Dewey influence to classroom discussions,

to the socialized classroom lesson units. The learner became far more ac-

tive than he had been under the method of instruction Herbart had

recommended and which teachers had heretofore followed. Classroom

work was still formal, but not as rigidly formal as it was under Herbart’s

pure influence upon our American schools. Moreover the fifth step of the

five formal steps, that of application, was characterized not only by a

proof that what had been taught had been both apprehended and com-

prehended but also by challenges to the learner to go beyond the mere

use of what he had learned by applying the new knowledge not only

to old but also to new situations. The encouragement to initiative be-

came marked. It was Dewey’s influence which gave us five steps in

learning, not formal ones, at least not so strictly formal and absolute

as Herbart’s had been but rather informal. These steps, which by no

means informalized the curriculum nor encouraged the learner to make

it, may be said to have been these:

1. Establishment of need for lesson (The problematic approach)

2. Statement of the lesson’s aim by pupil (The evidence of self-

activity)

3. Vitalization of lesson (Socialized recitation)

4. Verification (Proof of acquisition of learning by self-activity of

learner)

5. Initiative (Encouragement given to pupil to ask questions of

teacher and of other pupils)



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW1 Page Forty-nine

The emphasis upon self-activity in the leaning process is evident.

It is evident, too, that the Froebelian influence is strong. It is, however,

not the pure kindergarten idea applied to classroom work. It is Dewey’s

influence upon formal instruction by means of an approach to it through

Froebel. It is the notion of self-activity which Dewey identified with

interest. Dewey defined interest as “The identification of the self with

some object or idea because of the necessity of that object on that idea

to the maintenance of self-expression”. This he had indicated in a pamph-

let he had written called “Interest as Related to Will”, to which we

previously have made reference. It was startlingly significant. It em-

bodied the essence of his strong influence upon education in the period

we are discussing. To Dr. John Dewey a great debt of gratitude is owed

for the path he blazed. We shall most certainly some day return to it.

Dewey’s influence in education helped not only to bring about

better classroom work in the elementary schools but to do what had not

been done before: revolutionize secondary school procedures, both in the

field of instruction and of administration. The growth of the cosmo-

politan or composite high school idea should be, in great measure, at-

tributed to Dewey’s influence. The increase of vocational training, of

commercial work, as well as the retention of the classical and of the

general, as the word was then understood, courses of study all given

under one roof, in one high school building, by reason of the flexibility

which better secondary school administration provided, so that pupils

could transfer, on demonstrated need, from one course to another, were

all brought about, directly or indirectly, by John Dewey’s influence.

We honor Dr. Dewey for the good work he has done. At the same

time we deplore his philosophy. We do not think it fair to call him a

philosopher at all. We think it a gross error, a complete lack of under-

standing, to attach to him the title “America’s foremost philosopher”.

In philosophy Dewey is but a mis-shapen pragmatist. He is atheistic

in his fundamental concepts and his notions of the relativity of ideas

make any discussion of the ultimate demonstrable truth of any thought,

in fact make any genuine progress in thought, impossible. To Dewey

only that is true which works out to your advantage. In following his

thought you come inevitably to the conclusion that man, who to Dewey

is the measure of all things, for whom there is no Absolute and for

whom belief in One is but a straw at which he grasps, should designedly

by any means bring about a condition that will enable him, the con-

queror, to have the advantage. Dewey’s philosophy, in its atheism, its



Page Fifty AMERICAN EDUCATION:

instrumentalism and its relativity points down the road along which his

followers are leading him, the road blazed by Georg Hegel and his pupil

Karl Marx, the road paved with murder, rape and ineffable tragedy,

the road of Stalinism. Dewey’s philosophy is as anti-American as was

that of Benedict Arnold. It has no place in a country which stamps on

its coins “In God We Trust”.

We honor Dewey as a reformer who, by reason of his better thinking

about purely educational procedures, brought about the better condi-

tions which prevailed in American school practices in the period between

1912 and 1935. What he accomplished is a permanent contribution.

As we have said we believe we shall, in time, return to it. We deplore

the fact that America could produce so atheistic a thinker as Dr. Dewey,

along philosophical lines, is. We believe that were it not for Dr. Dewey

and the work accomplished by his disciple. Dr. George Counts, in the

philosophy of education as expressed by the work done in the Soviet

Union between 1917 and 1933, the world would be a happier place

than it is today. When you add Hegel’s notion of the validity of war

and Marx’s ideas of economic revolution of the proletariat to Dewey’s

concepts of philosophy you produce a condition that threatens the enslave-

ment of man, the end of human liberty and the destruction of all proper

prospects of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for each human

being in a country such as ours which guarantees to each of its citizens

these endowments made ours in humanity’s name by the Creator.

It is Dewey’s philosophy of atheistic instrumentalism which when

supported by Hegel’s thoughts on the sublimity of power, of force, of

war itself and fortified by Marx’s doctrines of collectivism and of the

inevitable supremacy of the proletariat over capitalistic classes that make

a frightening total. It is this prospect we have before us in America

today. It is this flower that was resident in the bud of Dewey’s educa-

tional reforms. Greatly as we may honor him for his efforts to improve

the practical art of teaching, we can not fail to see the malpractices that

have come to pass by reason of his thought.

These malpractices we see not only in his distortions of Froebel’s

thought but also in the educational associations that have been brought

into existence by those who became his disciples when he joined the

staff of Teachers College, at the turn of the century, and the many others,

known and unknown, in thousands of classrooms throughout the United

States who have consistently supported Dewey and his disciples from

1904 until the present day.



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Fifty-one

The full impact of Dewey’s thought upon American education was

realized in 1935 when the Board of Education of the City of New York

adopted on an experimental basis, the “activity program”. It was put into

operation supposedly on a limited basis in only a few schools, with

“control schools” proceeding on the traditional curriculum and follow-

ing the legal courses of study to be used as a balance check against the

“new” education which had but recently been ejected from Russia.

The deceit and the misrepresentation that accompanied the movement

to gild the ex-Russian “old” education, as it was now described in the

Soviet, were soon crystal clear. The extension of the “activity program”

to over fifty schools was so rapid as to appear to be the work of a magic

influence. It spread throughout the elementary schools and even to the

high school system. Duplicity and compulsion accompanied its progress.

Teachers were terrorized into a condition which tied their tongues.

Those who were inclined to be fearful or “wiser in their own conceit

than are the children of light” became, in public, protagonists for the

“new” education though, in private conversation, they deplored it. As a

consequence not only has education, but school morale among the pro-

fessional corps as well, suffered irreparable damage. Strikes among

pupils and suspension of participation in all extra-curricular activities

by teachers have become the accepted pattern. The forces of modern

unionism worked feverishly to cause a break down in school controls

and unfortunately, owing to the cowardice of far too many teachers,

supposedly professional people, succeeded. The blow was fatal. School

morale is dead in the City of New York and the “activity program” is

now almost universally prevalent in the schools of the largest city in the

world. The City of New York is following the footsteps of the Soviet

on an educational path that is leading toward the eventual supremacy

of some one who thinks like Joe Stalin and who will establish here in

the United States of America by the power of force, a socialistic state.

The issue is clear and its origin is traceable. The help that John Dewey

and his “Social Frontiesmen” have rendered is apparent. The co-opera-

tion that the most humble school teacher, by acquiescence in policies,

strategems, devices, plans and practices that she in her heart knows and

has known for the past fifteen years to be against fundamental morality

and truth has given, is pitiable. With it we have no sympathy.

It has been not only through pressure exerted on the Board of Edu-

cation of the City of New York that the plan of the “Progressives” in

the field of education has been made clear. It has been made clear in



Page Fifty-two AMERICAN EDUCATION:

the pressures exerted throughout the United States by those who have

brought into existence a militant army whose aim is the control of edu-

cation so that they may gain influence over the thoughts of the youth of

our land and the power to establish in this country a condition analogous

to the one that now exists in the Soviet. The organization of their forces

is a tribute to the radicals in the profession of teaching as well as to the

“educational experts” at Washington. We admire them in the same spirit
that we admire efficient gangsters.

We have traced the growth of Dewey’s disciples to the establishment

of the John Dewey Society. We have shown how these “Social Frontiers-

men” became the Progressive Education Association and still later the

American Education Fellowship. Another group, the National Education

Association received its charter from Congress in 1906.* By reason of

the activity of this group the matter of federal aid to education in the

the several states was brought to a focus in 1918, by the introduction

of the Smith-Towner bill into Congress. This bill, as we have indicated,

failed of enactment. Into every Congress since a similar bill providing

for the apportionment of $300,000,000 by the federal government to aid

the several states in their support of public schools has been introduced,

though studies have shown that only two states, North Carolina and

New Mexico, have any real problem in the matter of providing proper

support for local public schools. The N. E. A., as it is popularly known

throughout the country, is eager, however, to have the Bureau of Edu-

*The National Education Association has endeavored over many years to build

in the United States of America the idea that it is representative of all the teachers

in the country and of their thoughts on education. By combination with other groups

it has endeavored to create for itself a monopolistic control of education. Recently

there appeared in American Unity, Vol. X. No. 3 — lanuary-February 1952, an
article headed

Danger! They’re After Our Schools.

The article in question is distorted and libelous in its attack on those who have

opposed the “new” education. In style it is closely akin to well known Russian

propaganda. Neither the article in question nor the magazine in which it appears,

which styles itself “A Monthly Educational Guide” is scholastically important.

What is important is this announcement on page 12 of the issue in question:

Sponsors of this Publication

National Association of Secondary School Principals

Department of Classroom Teachers of the National Education Association

American Association of Colleges for Teachers Education

Commission for the Defense of Democracy through Education, N.E.A.

American Jewish Committee

John Dewey Society

Committee of Tenure and Academic Freedom, N.E.A.

Department of Higher Education, N.E.A.



THE OLD, MODERN, “NEW” Page Fifty-three

cation of the Department of the Interior raised to the dignity of a sepa-

rate department of government with a cabinet officer as its head. So it

continues its efforts and even tries to disguise them by adding the ques-

tion of teachers salaries to its campaigns.

Of late years, however, there has been a coalescence of the work of

the American Education Fellowship, whose origins we have traced, with

the work of the N. E. A. The latter organization has become extremely

active in its promotion of “progressive” education. During the past year

there have appeared in magazines throughout the country articles writ-

ten by members of the original John Dewey Society and of the Progres-

sive Education Association assailing all those who have had the courage

to oppose them and the “progressive” educational policies of which

they are the proponents. All these, inclusive of the writer, have been

called the enemies of public education. The purpose of the united front

presented by the coalescence of the Social Frontiersmen of the American

Education Fellowship with the National Education Association has been

tersely expressed by some of the present day leadership of the movement

to fasten “progressive” education and its purpose of building a new social

order upon this country.

We could make quotations from the “Progressives” to prove who, in

this day and hour, are really the enemies not only of our American

schools but also of our American way of life. In the House of Repre-

sentatives on March 21, 1952 Hon. Paul W. Shafer of Michigan presented

a most complete documentation of the work of the Social Frontiersmen.

We submit, in conclusion, that we have proved our case and have shown

who is weakening the United States of America and thereby destroying

the last hope of Western Christian civilization.



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