Radical Classics of American Educators

Three recently compiled lists reveal the range and sources of inspiration of America's teachers today. When we examine these lists, we see that, over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, literary inspiration for American teachers shifted from conservative works on education to radical works.

From the Doyle Report (www.thedoylereport.com) is the following list of American education classics, (listed in order of publication), representing the conservatively toned mainstream of school reform.

The Conservative Classic Canon

• Bestor, Arthur. The Restoration of Learning: A Program for Redeeming the Unfulfilled Promise of American Education (New York: Knopf, 1955).
• Flesch, Rudolf. Why Johnny Can't Read: And What You Can Do About It (New York: Harper & Row,1955).
• Barzun, Jacques. House of Intellect (New York: Harper & Bro., 1959).
• Mitchell, Richard. The Graves of Academe (Boston: Little, Brown, 1981).
• Coleman, James, Thomas Hoffer, and Sally Kilgore. High School Achievement: Public, Catholic, and Private Schools Compared (New York: Basic Books, 1982).
• "A Nation At Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform"; National Commission on Excellence in Education, April 1983.
• Ravitch, Diane. The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
• Bestor, Arthur. Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Our Public Schools (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985).
• Ravitch, Diane. The Schools We Deserve: Reflections on the Educational Crises of Our Time (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
• Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).
• Hirsch, E., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
• Glenn, Charles L. Jr. The Myth of the Common School (Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press, 1988).
• Lieberman, Myron. Privatization and Educational Choice (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 1989).
• Chubb, John E and Terry M. Moe. Politics, Markets, and America's Schools (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution,
  1990).

The dates of publication of the classics in the Doyle Report are striking. No titles in the list were published in the 1960s and 1970s. The reason is clear when we look at two more lists of "classics". During the 1960s and 1970s, a raft of radical educational manifestos and philosophies were published to challenge academically oriented titles of the 1950s. Teacher Magazine (www.teachermagazine.org) provides the following "liberal canon", defined as progressive works that most influenced teachers.

The Progressive Canon

• Dewey, John. Experience and education. (New York: The Macmillan company, 1938.)
• Holt, John. How Children Fail. (New York: Dell, 1965, c1964.)
• Kozol, Jonathan. Death at an Early Age; The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools. (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1967.)
• Postman, Neil, and Charles Weingartner. Teaching as a Subversive Activity. (New York : Dell Publishing Co., 1969.)
• Sizer, Theodore R. Horace's Compromise--The Dilemma of the American High School; the first report from A study of American high schools, co-sponsored by the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the Commission on Educational Issues of the National Association of Independent Schools. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.)
• Greene, Maxine. The Dialectic of Freedom. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1988.)
• Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America's Underprepared. (New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1989.)
• Delpit, Lisa. Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. (New York : New Press : Distributed by W.W. Norton, 1995.)

Apparently, many teachers expressed their dissatisfaction with the liberal canon. The editors of the magazine compiled another list of titles. Some of these works are significantly to the left of the progressivist pedagogy in the liberal canon.

The Left Canon

• Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1903.)
• Neill, A.S. Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing. Foreword by Erich Fromm. (New York, Hart Pub. Co., 1960.)
• Ashton-Warner, Sylvia. Teacher. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963.)
• Kohl, Herbert. 36 Children. Illus. by Robert George Jackson, III. (New York: New American Library, 1967.)
• Herndon, James. The Way It Spozed To Be. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968.)
• Dennison, George. The Lives of Children: The Story of the First Street School. (New York, Random House, 1969.)
• Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed [Pedagogía del oprimido]. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. ([New York] Herder and Herder, 1970.)
• Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. (New York: Harper & Row, [1971] 1970.)
• Kohn, Alfie. No Contest: The Case Against Competition. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986.)
• Meier, Deborah. The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.)

The three lists include only a few titles from the feminist and post-modernist literatures in the philosophy of education. To determine whether other outstanding feminist titles were omitted, I turned to the well-regarded anthology, Critical Conversations in Philosophy of Education, Wendy Kohli, editor (New York: Routledge, 1995).

In Kohli's anthology, twenty-eight English-language scholars and philosophers of education debate new perspectives on education. Issues include "Aims and Purposes of Education", "Educating for Moral and Ethical Life, and "Difference, Identity, and Otherness in a Multicultural World".

Perhaps, because the educators are American, their philosophical influences are American. The most frequently cited philosophical sources are well-known works by John Dewey and Richard Rorty. The only European thinker to be cited as often as the Americans is Foucault. The European philosophers, Wittgenstein and Habermas, are mentioned a few times.

Most feminist thinkers are of little direct influence. Works by Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway make brief appearances. The two most cited feminist theorists are Seyla Benhabib, a trained philosopher and professor of government at Harvard University, and Nel Noddings, professor of education at Stanford University.

Benhabib is a political philosopher, not an education philosopher. Her collection of essays, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992) has, nonetheless, apparently inspired philosophers of education to apply communitarian ethical and political theory to pedagogy. It is difficult to believe, however, that most teachers would willingly wade through Benhabib's dense, highly abstract, analyses of Aristotle, Hegel, Arendt, and Habermas in order to learn how communitarian criticism has demolished traditional Western individualist political philosophy.

Noddings is a leading American philosopher of education; her gracefully written, intelligent works would appropriately represent feminist educational philosophy on the lists. We could imagine that working teachers would find many useful ideas in her program. We choose a semi-popular title to represent her technical works. Added:

• Noddings, Nel. The Challenge To Care In Schools: An Alternative Approach To Education (New York : Teachers College Press, 1992).

We might explain the popularity of radical educational statements, in the liberal canon and its radical addendum, as part of educators' implementation of the desegregation of American schools. Integrating minority children of color, becoming sensitive to their needs, and removing obstacles to their learning advancement in the integrated classroom flowed naturally (within the progressive American tradition) from the decision to end desegregation. Nonetheless, embedded in these lists are visions of school, curriculum, and pedagogy radically at variance with the general practice of American k-12 public education today and subversive of progressive--as well as traditional--educational theory.

Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, arguably the two most influential radical sources, are Marxist revolutionary visions of the school. Noddings' Challenge To Care, while representing feminism and citing (critical) allegiance to Dewey, grounds itself in the philosophy of Heidegger. It is not clear that Noddings is aware of the facist implications of Heidegger's philosophy; but Noddings promotes a feminist corporatism that, by itself, would be as revolutionary as anything Freire and Illich propose. These books cannot be presumed to promote the civic function or liberal goals desired by most Americans of their public schools.

(This article was originally published elsewhere, in somewhat different form, in March 2004.)